Art as service

This post is long, and it mostly has to do with art. But I'll get to the service part at the end, I promise.

I first learned how to do calligraphy in high school and thought it was interesting. I guess I was good enough at it that my mom asked me to write out "If wishes were trees I'd have a forest", and she framed it and hung it up in our home. I hadn't done calligraphy since then.

A few times in the past year plus I'd mentioned to Vettorio that I would be interested in learning how to do it SCA style. He made pleased noises but didn't think I was serious about it.
This past June I took a road trip to KWHSS with him, Lada, and Onora. On the way I asked them a bunch of questions about starting off in calligraphy. They still didn't think I was serious. They said write out lyrics to my favorite song. I don't really have a favorite song, so Onora suggested writing out the names of everybody that played The Doctor (big Doctor Who nerd here). A week or so before I went on family vacation in July I asked Vettorio which hand (I made the error of calling it a font) I sound try. I wrote out "this is what my handwriting looks like" on a post-it and he suggested 2 hands. One of them looked fairly modern, the other was gothic. I already had a felt tip calligraphy marker, and got lose leaf paper and I wrote out the names.

Then I wrote out the lyrics to the Firefly theme song. At this point I asked Vettorio if there were capital letters to go with the alphabets he sent me. Then I found a list of pangrams and wrote those out. Those are sentences that use all the letters of the alphabet. Like "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is one.

At this point I was on vacation and there was a Michael's nearby so I went and found the brand pen and ink that was suggested to me. It was too difficult to use the ink pen at the house we were staying in, there was no flat surface I could use to write on. so I kept practicing with the marker, which would work fine on the padded table cloth of the dining room table.

Once back home, I kept practicing, now with the ink pen.  I wrote out lyrics to a few other songs. Beatles' "I will", and Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pidgeons in the park". Before Pennsic Lada asked me to write what I would describe as not-a-scroll. A silly fun scroll-like thing for a pirate at Pennsic. I found that I even had computer paper that was made to look like a pirate map parchment. I passed that off to the people who requested it, and Lada said they were very happy with the result.

I've been setting small goals for myself. Learn how to write the letters. Get good enough to use the fountain pen. Get confident enough to use bristol paper. Get good enough to do baronial scrolls.

This past week I dug out a portable desk I've had since high school. It worked amazingly well.

I taped a piece of bristol paper down, drew lines on it, and found suggested wording for champion scrolls. Since the next event is the archery and thrown weapon challenges I made up scrolls for those. I even left enough room if I can get anybody to do some simple illumination on top, maybe down the sides as well.

I wrote the archery champion scroll and realized halfway through the barony name realized I made a typo and messed up the spelling. Argh, I hate Gaelic! Lada said "Leave it. Typos are period". So I finished the scroll and showed it to my sister. It took her 3 times looking at the scroll before she even realized it was misspelled, so I laughed and didn't worry about it too much.

I moved onto the thrown weapon scroll and that went much better. I still wanted to do more, so I started the archery one over. This time I wrote it all out in pencil first. Only one line at the very bottom didn't space out right in pencil vs. ink, but it looked so much better. I showed it to my sister and she said she could see improvement with every scroll I did.

So now I'll offer them up to my baron/ess if they haven't already arranged for scrolls. If they want them, great. Onora said she'd pretty them up with some illumination. If not, I'll call it practice and put them to the side and keep making scrolls until my scribe friends tell me I'm ready to do simple scrolls for the kingdom.

I think I'll wait until these are either declined or awarded to show them off here.

It is art, but I'm certain I will enjoy having helped in scrolls to give out to the populace. Also helping out illuminating friends if they want to pass them off to somebody else to do the calligraphy. That's how this ties into service.


Edited to add:
My scrolls will not be used, but I was asked if I wanted to do the Heavy Weapons and Rapier champion scrolls. So I will find an illuminator friend (most likely Fiona) to coordinate with and make some scrolls for the barony.