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I'm back! Did you miss me?

I can take some time to breathe now, because Scary Deadline #1 for this week has been met, and Huge Load Of Work for Scary Deadline #2 (Friday) can wait a few hours.

I've been doing a ketubah. Well, a Lovers' Covenant, anyway. It's used by couples who can't stomach the traditional ketubah text, and either want a non-halakhic replacement or a comforting addition (the text is by Rachel Adler, do email me if you want a copy). I've been busybusybusy beavering away on it. In addition to the floor getting covered with little bits of cutout paper, I seem to've acquired a patch of No Feeling on the fingertip which was guiding the scalpel, despite padding it with a bit of sock.

So, here're some pictures, which I haven't hitherto had time to upload.

Not quite finished...


Backing paper, applied with lots and lots of archivist's tape (it's like sellotape for grown-ups, it never turns yellow or falls off. Awesome, huh?)...


Complete!


This is one of the pictures from the corners. Each corner is a different picture of something meaningful to the couple. My Freaking Awesome colleague Demetrios did them; line art isn't my thing, and it jolly well is his.

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The other Huge Work thing I've been doing of late, and am still doing, is re-lettering a sad Torah. It's normal for the letters in Torahs to crack and flake over time; you hope that it will happen over a couple of centuries rather than a couple of decades. When this happens, you just rewrite the flaky bit and all is well. Like this letter nun: it's flaked a bit, but you colour in the flaked part, and it's kosher again. (There's more to it than that; please don't try this at home unless you know what all the other bits are.)

Sometimes, perhaps owing to bad parchment, or bad ink, or being kept in poor conditions, flaking gets REALLY BAD:

Normally, this would signal Time To Buy A New Torah. But this congregation is emotionally attached to this one, and is willing to pay to have it fixed, thus:

It's not an economical decision; it's more than likely that they'll all fall off again a few years from now, and the cost of repair is easily as much as the cost of buying a second-hand sefer. If your sefer looks like this, start shopping for a replacement.

Anyway, this is what I'm doing at the moment.

And for good measure, an example of what happens on Bad Ink Days. The shin in the middle of the third row started out like a normal sort of shin, just a bit blobby, like the one in the top row...but then it spread itself out and decided not to be a shin any more. I shall fix it by scraping the letter off with a scalpel and rewriting.