Welcome to another segment of, The Work In Progress. Following a desire to make my work more special, I decided to individually hand cut and design “Wedding Gift Tags” for a class project a few semesters ago in my Computer Graphics I class.
I love working with wood, so it seemed right to make a significant day even more special with wooden gift tags (love in every cut). I sketched out my design and chose which words to use that would best fit in with the overall theme, as well as with each other. After writing down a few quotes I chose the best six and started practicing my calligraphy skills. Although I’ve learned a lot more over the course of two years, the lettering seemed to fit in well. The typeface I chose to work with was one called Harrington with its decorative style and whimsical strokes. I drew a final design for the wood cut on paper after many attempts. Nowadays I would have those other designs beside my final one in order to compare and see what works and doesn’t work.
I bought a long and thin plank of wood which would be cut up equally into their own parts. I made my design on paper, cut it out, and traced it on top of each wood piece so that each one would have the exact same design. Afterwords, I used a band saw machine to accurately cut out the design and sand paper to smooth out each tag. For the holes on each side, I had to use a very small power drill bit to drill right through the middle of them. Each piece took around twenty minutes to successfully cut and sand.
For the calligraphy, I wanted to wood burn the type into the tags. After testing it out on a scrap piece of wood, I found it to not have the smooth style that I wanted, but also it was just too tedious to work with. I decided to stick with paint, not only to give me the color that I wanted, but to have more control over the strokes. Before I painted them on, I sketched them in so that my work of wood cutting would not be in vain if I made an accident.
To top it off, I bought some red ribbons to tie a bow through one of the holes in the gift tags. The aesthetic beauty of natural wood lines adds to the simplicity of the tags. At the same time, the lucky couple would know that a lot of time and patience went into each one, leaving their wedding to an extraordinary ending.
Please leave a comment below if you have any critiques or comments, or simply just LIKE and SHARE!
