Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 The hardest part was getting the braid around the outside right. I wanted it to be just one line, going round and round, but if you just run a sinewave around the edge, you get either two or four lines, and I very much wanted only one line, because [...]
Part 1, Part 2 One of the clever things about piyutim is all the little linguistic tricks they use. Rhyme, of course; I tried to use white space between stanzas to show the rhyming structure, but I think I didn’t use quite enough of it. So, there’s rhyme. Then there’s alphabetical acrostic, which I’ve indicated [...]
Part 1 Since this is a poem for Shabbat Nachamu, a poem which references the first verse of the haftara we say that day, I wanted to have that haftara in the border. It’s Isaiah chapter 40:2 ff and a bit of 41; it starts in the top right-hand corner. There are a couple of [...]
This is a liturgical piece, a Magen by Qallir for Shabbat Nachamu. A Magen is the first in a sequence of poems adorning the first three berakhot of the Amidah, up to the Kedusha; the Magen adorns the first berakha, “Magen Avraham.” Translation from the ever-estimable Mar Gavriel: With Me, from Lebanon, you shall not [...]
(Click to see bigger) Bride and groom, When we started this process, you said “I don’t think it could possibly work out, but I just had to give it a try.” You asked for something you thought was impossible, and it turned into something quite lovely. May your marriage have many similar shots at seemingly-impossible [...]
I like a bit of a challenge now and again. Here’s a community that wants to honour its rabbi by giving him a piece of artwork. Since the rabbi is well-beloved by the families with children, the Surprise Committee wanted to have the children participate in creating the artwork. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually result in [...]
Here’s an interesting question: Dear Ms. Friedman, this is not specifically about religious scrolls, but as a scribe, could you tell me how many handwritten letters can usually fit on the parchment made from one cow, or on the parchment made from one goat, or on the parchment made from one sheep? Assuming the letter [...]
Isn’t this sweet? It’s the little letter aleph in “Vayikra,” but it’s a particularly tiny version, where the height of the whole letter aleph is same as the width of the quill used for the other letters. The regular letters in this sefer, by the way, were 7mm high. Huge!
A question from someone typesetting a ketubah: “I’m using typefaces that have a hand-done feel to them, but obviously they are mechanical. There are some typefaces (Guttman Stam and Guttman Stam 1) that recreate a sofrut look. One of these uses taggin and one is plain. I have no pretension to be following sofrut laws, [...]
This Purim, I was commissioned to write a megillah for the Abramson Center for Jewish Life, and not just create a megillah, but also a case for it to live in. The Center’s rabbi asked if I could make a design that drew on the Center’s existing artwork, and that’s what you see above. The [...]
