Confirmation Gifts from Michigan

Now that the recipients have seen these gifts, I can post them here.

Mom already posted about the confirmation a few weeks ago, and here are the gifts I made for the confirmands.  I was able to find out their confirmation verses ahead of time for these, but then for various reasons, was unable to get them finished and sent in time for the big day, so these gifts were a little late.

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This is Evelyn's.  I will admit to cheating a tad on this... It is the same verse that a young lady in our church had last year.  I still had my drafts from that, so I did another of the same design.

I had trouble with the matting and framing of this one.  For one thing, cutting mats is the pits.  Also, I usually prefer black-core mat for calligraphy, but I only had enough for one, not both pieces. So I decided to double mat the above one with navy as the under-mat.  Of course then they didn't both fit into the front-load frame I was using.  I eventually made it work, but it was tricky and involved some sketchy work with a utility knife.

This one is for Katrina-- tricky to make such a long passage work without overcrowding.  And maybe I overdid some of the flourishes?  But I love flourishes... I also love the black-core mat on this one, even though I was nerve-wracked while cutting it lest I wreck the one good bit of matboard...

I thought maybe that the boys would appreciate something a little more masculine than traditional calligraphy.  My husband was out of town at the time and refused to give me over-the-phone lessons of using his table saw (I just can't understand why), so I had my Amish neighbor cut me some plywood boards.  He did a much better job than I'm sure I would have, and he ran them through his shaper and sander as well.

I put my newfound mixed media skills to work to make interesting backgrounds.

The lettering is done with a black chisel-tip paint pen.

I clear-coated these with gloss acrylic spray, and sort of regretted that because the smell was so strong.  I could still smell it eeking out of the box when I dropped off it at the post office...

I had so much fun with these projects!  (Except for the matting and framing part.  That part is still the pits.)