![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It occurred to me the other day, teaching someone about wood glue, that I've been building up to this work for twenty years. I haven't been doing calligraphy for twenty years, far from it - more like six or seven. I took up calligraphy in college, because I didn't have space in my college room for all my other craft stuff. But I've been doing crafts since I was five, when my mum taught me how to sew things for my toy Bunny, possibly as a ruse to get me off her back.
Crafts develop all kinds of skills that you wouldn't necessarily think of as relevant for sofrut, but when you work with people who have no background in this sort of thing, you realise just how many skills you actually use, and how many of them have become intuitive.
For instance, a quill. You have to know how to handle a knife and a razor blade - you whittle the feather, shaping the point finely, slitting the ink channel. If you don't have mastery of cutting tools, it's inexpressibly difficult to cut a good quill, and if you haven't a good quill, you haven't a chance of writing well.
Or ink. Working with paint gives you a lot of skills you can transfer to ink - just how full it's worth loading your brush - or pen - how to handle it when it's too runny or too thick, what to add to remedy this, a sense of how much will be too much. And knowing things like how pigment liquids tend to settle out, how to revitalise them, how to get them out of your clothes. Even basic habits like capping bottles and washing brushes - I know I learned the virtues of these the hard way.
And in the broader sofrut skill-set - patching, for instance. If you work with glue and paper a lot, a whole lot of things about patching come very easily. What kinds of glue will stick, what kinds will eventually go yellow and rubbery. How to prepare edges so that they'll stick down cleanly, what happens if you don't wipe up excess glue, what happens if you leave flappy bits, how gluing (or applying paint to) smooth surfaces differs from gluing rough surfaces or flaky surfaces - all these are things I realise I've learned through years of turning shoeboxes into miniature mansions. Or sewing seams. (Why aren't young men taught to sew?) How to thread a needle. How to knot the end of a thread and know when a knot is the right size. How to prevent the needle coming unthreaded with every stitch. How to handle the needle so that it comes in and goes out where you want it to without getting bent - why a bent needle is best avoided. How tight to pull a stitch, how to fasten off at the end, what happens if you don't. I know all this like I know how to put my socks on.
So much of this is more or less impossible to explain, as well. It's not something learned by rule, it's accumulated through countless instances of getting it wrong, and getting better bit by bit over many years. It just becomes part of you, and if someone asks "How do you do that?" the honest answer is "Start at the beginning and keep getting it wrong until you get it right, and then do it again." The specific applications to sofrut aren't necessarily exactly the same - parchment works differently from wood, ink from paint, quills from brushes - but they're awfully similar.
Twenty years of dollshouses don't make you a sofer, but they certainly help.
Crafts develop all kinds of skills that you wouldn't necessarily think of as relevant for sofrut, but when you work with people who have no background in this sort of thing, you realise just how many skills you actually use, and how many of them have become intuitive.
For instance, a quill. You have to know how to handle a knife and a razor blade - you whittle the feather, shaping the point finely, slitting the ink channel. If you don't have mastery of cutting tools, it's inexpressibly difficult to cut a good quill, and if you haven't a good quill, you haven't a chance of writing well.
Or ink. Working with paint gives you a lot of skills you can transfer to ink - just how full it's worth loading your brush - or pen - how to handle it when it's too runny or too thick, what to add to remedy this, a sense of how much will be too much. And knowing things like how pigment liquids tend to settle out, how to revitalise them, how to get them out of your clothes. Even basic habits like capping bottles and washing brushes - I know I learned the virtues of these the hard way.
And in the broader sofrut skill-set - patching, for instance. If you work with glue and paper a lot, a whole lot of things about patching come very easily. What kinds of glue will stick, what kinds will eventually go yellow and rubbery. How to prepare edges so that they'll stick down cleanly, what happens if you don't wipe up excess glue, what happens if you leave flappy bits, how gluing (or applying paint to) smooth surfaces differs from gluing rough surfaces or flaky surfaces - all these are things I realise I've learned through years of turning shoeboxes into miniature mansions. Or sewing seams. (Why aren't young men taught to sew?) How to thread a needle. How to knot the end of a thread and know when a knot is the right size. How to prevent the needle coming unthreaded with every stitch. How to handle the needle so that it comes in and goes out where you want it to without getting bent - why a bent needle is best avoided. How tight to pull a stitch, how to fasten off at the end, what happens if you don't. I know all this like I know how to put my socks on.
So much of this is more or less impossible to explain, as well. It's not something learned by rule, it's accumulated through countless instances of getting it wrong, and getting better bit by bit over many years. It just becomes part of you, and if someone asks "How do you do that?" the honest answer is "Start at the beginning and keep getting it wrong until you get it right, and then do it again." The specific applications to sofrut aren't necessarily exactly the same - parchment works differently from wood, ink from paint, quills from brushes - but they're awfully similar.
Twenty years of dollshouses don't make you a sofer, but they certainly help.
Tags: