Show and tell – wedding calligraphy

So, about those wed­ding sup­pli­ers I’m here to show­case — I’m still fig­ur­ing out the best way to do it. It’s about find­ing a bal­ance: I’m not inter­ested in adver­tis­ing blurb, I want to know about the peo­ple behind the busi­nesses, and I want to read inter­est­ing blog posts. So hope­fully my new ‘show and tell’ mini-interview fea­ture will become a reg­u­lar thing.

I hope this doesn’t come across as all ‘me, me, me!’ but I thought I should go first. It wouldn’t be fair of me to ask other sup­pli­ers to do my lit­tle inter­views if I wasn’t pre­pared to put any effort into this myself. And since I’m on a bit of a quest to find my blog­ging per­son­al­ity, I thought it’d be fun to have a go.

So…

Show and Tell: The Wed­ding Calligrapher

Claire (me!) runs a small wed­ding cal­lig­ra­phy busi­ness based in Cheshire, which she’s had since Novem­ber 2005. She writes names on wed­ding invi­ta­tions, addresses envelopes and writes bespoke cal­lig­ra­phy table plans and poems in calligraphy.

What inspires you?

I always look at signs and posters, old books, paint­ings and flow­ers for inspi­ra­tion for my cal­lig­ra­phy. And I sub­scribe to other cal­lig­ra­phers’ web­sites to see what they’re doing — A Place to Flour­ish has gor­geous cal­lig­ra­phy exam­ples from the US and I love Con­tem­po­rary Cal­lig­ra­phy for inspi­ra­tion that can be a lit­tle bit men­tal at times!

What do you love most about your work?

There’s noth­ing bet­ter than get­ting great feed­back from cus­tomers. An email from a bride say­ing she loved her table plan or that all the guests com­mented on the invi­ta­tion cal­lig­ra­phy — that makes it the best job in the world. (Although when cus­tomers phone to say thank you it scares me, I always think I’ve missed some­thing or they don’t like it… touch wood that’s never hap­pened though!)

The other great thing about being a self employed cal­lig­ra­pher is that I can take time off if I need to. One day in Feb­ru­ary my boyfriend and I skipped work to go and play in the snow at Lyme Park — it was beau­ti­ful and I did dou­ble the work the day after to make up.

Have you had any unusual requests?

Only two that stick in my mind: one girl emailed with a very def­i­nite idea of what she wanted: she was going to get Japan­ese fans to use as her wed­ding invi­ta­tions, and could I write out her invi­ta­tion word­ing onto the Japan­ese fans… hav­ing flat paper is pretty impor­tant in my line of work so my answer was a resound­ing “um… no!”

I also had a cus­tomer recently who had her invi­ta­tions writ­ten in cal­lig­ra­phy, and then a few lit­tle extras, wed­ding day gifts and bespoke thank you cards. She sent her husband-to-be around to col­lect the fin­ished cal­lig­ra­phy. On his sec­ond visit he explained that she’d “hired a wed­ding plan­ner and gone a bit mad”, and would be get­ting in touch for me to write a table plan which would then be trans­formed into an ice sculp­ture! Thank­fully she changed her mind about that one!

What one piece of advice would you give to read­ers of Eng­lish Wedding?

Trust your instincts. Use sup­pli­ers you like, espe­cially on the wed­ding day. Every­one has dif­fer­ent expec­ta­tions. If you email a sup­plier and they’re overly friendly and infor­mal, or too busi­nesslike, go with your instincts and find some­one else. You need to be com­fort­able com­mu­ni­cat­ing with your wed­ding sup­pli­ers so find ones you love and stick with them!