An earlier commission

 A while ago now we were asked if we could provide a small sign to recognise a lovely man.  Following his death, friends had planted a tree in line of sight of one of his favourite and precious views and they thought it would be nice to have a marker which would simply say "For James".

We decided it would work well etched on aluminium and in a calligraphic hand.

So I did a few trials to fit the size of the marker

And then after the style has been selected, I offered two possibilities and the final one was selected from them.

And then it was on to transferring the lettering to the aluminium.  And that proved harder than one imagined.  After several trials it got there.

I thought how easy would it be to trace and transfer through the carbon paper?

Possibly really easy if you had fresh carbon paper; however, mine is rather secondhand and sadly it attached itself in several places.

Trying to get it off was pretty hard.  

And the risk was that the carbon paper left on the plate would act as a stop out or block out and prevent the etch from working in the right places. All of the blue muck would have ended up forming part of the design! 

So we cleaned it off (lots of elbow grease by Barry) and then used a stylus to try and trace the lettering back on.

And then to use the block out paint.  It was impossible to get a really fine tip working, so we did the best we could, with the odd wobble.

And then into the etching bath where it really built up a head of steam!

Barry added in the brass legs and now it rests proudly in front of the tree. 

A gentle, handcrafted and heart-felt statement.

Thank you to our friends for enabling us to be part of this precious wee memorial.