November 23, 2010 – 12:41
For what it’s worth, this is the paper I’m presently recommending to my students. Scribes write on parchment, but parchment is mad expensive, and it’s foolish to take your first tottery strokes with a quill on the most expensive medium available. Much better to get started on paper. But what sort of paper? You don’t […]
November 22, 2010 – 12:41
I went to a talk at the Jewish Theological Seminary a while back, on the poetry of Yehuda haLevi. Specifically, two translators were talking about their approaches to translating haLevi’s poetry. Those of us who work with Bible translations frequently have occasion to remark that translations are necessarily also commentaries, and this talk emphasised the […]
…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 […]
I may have spent the evening putting artwork onto mugs. Click mug images to buy at Zazzle. My cup runneth over: This one’s particularly fine, I think, for hot drinks on chilly Shabbat afternoons at seudah shelishit, when people are singing “kosi revaya” anyway. Also good for people like me who tend to overfill their […]
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 […]
The Women’s Torah Project peeps sent me a pretty pretty certificate honouring me as one of the Sisters of the Torah, “dedicated to the discovery of ancient roots and the creation of powerful futures.” Isn’t that sweet and generous of them? As I think I’ve said before, the project organisers really are rather a special […]
