Reflections of Sorts

Can anyone bring 2 pairs of latex or nitrile gloves to masteraleph and levana_b's wedding? Archival cloth gloves will also work. I want to make the עדים wear them when they sign the כתובה, just to make sure they don't smudge anything with their sweaty, sweaty hands. A pair for the מסדר קדושין would not go amiss, either.

Times like these, I really miss my job. Constant access to nitrile and archival gloves.

I'll post more about the return later, but for now I need to whine.

First off, why doesn't any place near me stock coated paper? I was not about to bring it back with me via Madrid -- it would have gotten hopelessly damaged on the way. But seriously, this is hippie/indy/arty-person central here. Why no coated paper? And Pearl has stopped stocking pen cartridges, the unprintables!

Current beef of the evening: quick dry gilding size takes 1.5 hours to achieve tack? Really? I suppose that's faster than the 10-12 necessary for slow-dry, but seriously. Do they think I have nothing better to do than sit around and watch size dry? Oh, yeah . . .

On the up side, scratch knives really are a girl's best friend. I thought I was going to have to redo the whole thing for a moment there, but a quick trip to Utrecht fixed that.

Semi-random thought brought on while taking my aliya this Shabbat so I could bentsch gomel*: do sofrim have to hold their pens at a 90 degree angle to the horizontal? That must suck!

*Normally when I am in front of a scroll, I am concentrating on reading it, or on not reading it as it is rolled, so I can't make it pasul. Beyond noticing whether the letters are well-formed, I don't usually have the spare brainpower to think of the mechanics of sofrut while reading. Hence not noticing until now.

On Friday April 25, less than half an hour before sundown (and thus after I had stopped checking my email until now) going into the last days of Pesach, I received a request for ketubah calligraphy . . . for May 10.



Edit: Apparently due to my "long" silence they found someone else. Good for them -- they need every second on that sort of deadline. They did say I "came very highly recommended," though!

As part of my new campaign to treat myself better, I bought some new pen nibs last night and attempted to learn to write Copperplate script with them. I have written Copperplate-esque scripts with a felt tip and with a pencil, but never with a metal nib, and certainly not a dip pen.

I don't usually think about it, because I tend to use flat nibs for calligraphy, not pointed ones, but pens can be loud. Working as a scrivener, with a bunch of other scriveners must have been a noisy occupation. It also gives new meaning to the phrase "scratching of pens."

As a side note, apparently minuscule has an antonym: majuscule. Not sure how I missed that all these years.