(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 [...]
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, [...]
December 30, 2010 – 11:00
“We like Rivka,” said my client, “but we’d like something more elaborate.” (Click to see bigger Rivka.) So this is what I did. (Click to see bigger Elaborate!Rivka.) Note particularly the SHINY PAINTS that sparkle in the light! I like this very much.
…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control… And the bride and groom took that and turned it into wishes for their marriage. Isn’t that nice? My black-letter script isn’t all it could be, but I’m very happy with how the illumination turned out. As well as [...]
So the last thing to do is fill in the text. First I learned the script, copying the original quite carefully. Then I used the techniques I talked about last summer, for fitting ketubah texts into given shapes, to fit the text into the available space. Exact text blurred for privacy reasons, but you get [...]
Faced with the task of copying an image from the internet and scaling it up to ketubah size, how does one go about it? Technique from primary school. Impose a grid onto your original, and copy each square into a scaled-up grid on your target medium. Printing the original picture gave me something on standard [...]
The ketubah text itself is a pretty standard text, with a few interesting features (click image to see bigger version; text reproduced in full below). The date of the wedding was 7 Marhesvan 5592, or Friday October 14th, 1831. It was in Modena (which they would have pronounced Modona, hence the spelling מודונא ) – [...]
This design uses different sizes of letters to make a lovely rich lacy border. What are the texts it’s using? The first text around the outside is Isaiah 61:10-62:1. שוש אשיש בייﭏ תגל נפשי בﭏדי כי הלבשני בגדי ישע מעיל צדקה יעטני כחתן יכהן פאר וככלה תעדה כליה כי כארץ תוציא צמחה וכגנה זרועיה תצמיח [...]
“Can you copy this ketubah?” my client asked me. Since this is a Historical Ketubah, there aren’t copyright issues, as there would be if someone wanted me to copy a contemporary design. So I’m happy to copy it; it’s lovely! “Copy” can mean several different things, though. It might mean “make us a border that [...]
