By way of introduction (or, I have no idea what I'm doing)

I really don't know what to write, so I'll just write, and hopefully something turns out...

And hopefully this blog doesn't turn out to be a false start like the last one.

Right, so, by way of introduction. --

I've been practicing calligraphy for the past year, and whenever someone sees the end result, the reaction tends to be favourable, usually with the questions of "did you do it yourself?", and "how do you do it?" And a friend suggested I create a blog. So, after resisting, and reflecting on the idea, I got sucked in and decided to start another blog. (This'll probably be more of a journal than anything; I can't imagine anyone actually taking the time to read this.)

I don't know when I got seriously interested in calligraphy ("seriously" is probably an exaggeration), but I've been interested in books from my youngest childhood (we have a family story about me being attracted to books at my first Christmas), and coupled with an interest in history, it probably wasn't a far stretch to get interested in medieval manuscripts. My first "major" project was done four years ago when I made bookmarks for two schools I was working at. In total, 68 double-sided bookmarks, with an image of a literary character from books that were in the libraries, and quotes about books, reading, writing, and libraries, in different colours and different scripts. All in all, a month of work (with a recent break-up as an inducement to really dive into the work), and within a half-hour of being in the kids' hands, they were being folded. Four years later, they're starting to look sad. I'm starting to think about replacing them for next year.

So last year I began "seriously" doing calligraphy (ok, "seriously" is really an exaggeration here) with a birthday "card" (it's 11"x14", for Pete's sake!) for a friend. As a result, I made two more, and I'm currently in various stages of working on five. And this is probably where I should stop this post, before everything gets even more muddled together than it already is.

This is the project that got *this* ball rolling.