Cadel initial

Spring is coming and my garden requests all of my time, so no time to do calligraphy. But, surfing on the web, I came accross a manuscript with quite a lot of cadel initials and could not resist. So here is a new cadel initial, inspired by the Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, AN II 3, an initial P, as usual, acid-etched on zinc.



I’m quite happy with it, partly because I could make it smaller than the previous ones without loosing the quality of the etching. It is 6 cm high.

Soon more initials inspired by the same manuscript, if gardening does not take all my spare time 🙂


happy new year

I didn’t post a lot lately. Partly because I had no time, partly because I’m lazy and partly because I was busy creating new stuff.
To apologize, I wish you happiness, health and prosperity for this new year.
And, as for a new start, here is a how to create a wish thing with a minimum of material and by recycling daily things.

1- take a lid from a jam pot (or other lid from other pot, beans is also a good choice).


2- draw, calligraph your text, pattern, thing with a marker on the lid.


3- Remove the paint with a nail (like the one that can been seen on the bottom right of the image) or any other tool suitable.


4- Once the pattern totally clean from the paint, use a battery connected to cotton bud to electro-etch the cleaned surfaces.


5- To remove the remaining paint, you can sand the lid or, if you’re as lazy as I am, just use a soldering lamp to burn the paint (beware of the fumes, probably very toxic !)
You’ll have to end with a bit of sanding with a emery cloth and that’s it !


Once you’ve taken a good pic of your etched lid, everyone will envy you 🙂



And if you prefer something more traditionnal, here are Jacques Brel‘s wishes on January 1978.



Mea culpa

I was recently telling you about things clams have to say and insisted on the fact that it wasn’t really enunciated sayings.
I first received some protests which were not really convincing.



Then I received other ones and I now have to admit that clams are not clumsy 🙂
Some can play (& even win) a tic-tac-toe game.


And others are scholarly, they know latin, psalms & english and are even able to arrange bilingual play on words.


In short, I’d like to apologize to all clams I may have offended and hope to hear from them soon.




Alphabet – next step

Once cleaned, here are the letters from my alphabet (technological miracle, I inverted the pic so you can see them on the right side).
As you can see, I made a mistake on some of them, the ones that looks inverted after being inverted :-/

Moreover, my printing tries are just awful, so awful that I won’t show even a bit of them.
I tihnk I’ll have to restart from the beginning, differently, with more care, briefly : to be followed…

To make you wait, here is a pic of the residues of the cleaning which is, probably, the best thing I got out of it.