Make your own ketubah!

The bride suggested a parrot. I'm not that keen on parrots and I deny that my birds (see above) look like chickens, but whatever. She's my darling girl and I do what she says. She made a little mockup of her preferred bird, and in her mockup she used these little purple flowers instead of the bigger flowers (and cherries) I used (see below).

First I pencilled in the guidelines of the outside of the ketubah. Using my prototype as a guide, I divided off the border and then made a stencil of the hexagonal flower and leaves shape and penciled it in. I diluted the acrylic a great deal and using it like watercolor I painted in the basic shapes in flat washes. When it's thoroughly dry I'll be able to erase these pencil guides. Then I'll move along to the inner border, which is more complicated.

At the bottom, you see my Mayline ruler. I've had it on this drafting board since 1976. It was expensive but I have gotten my money's worth hundreds of times over. It makes it dead easy to keep everything parallel and perpendicular and square without misery.

Later I'll explain how I managed to size this text.

As you'll see below in some of the samples of old-fashioned ketubot, the idea of "Jerusalem" was rather fanciful in the minds of the artists, who had surely never seen the city - and there were no photographs in those days! So they made the city to their own measure. I did the same.

This was the last empty space on the ketubah, so I'm happy we figured out what to put in it. My daughter selected a traditional phrase which means "Joy and gladness, groom and bride, mirth, song, delight and rejoicing, love and harmony and peace and companionship."

I had to use 1. Google docs; 2. Microsoft word; 3. Corelpaint (InDesign etc. would also work) and 4. irfanview in order to figure out how best to fit the type. I could have done it by hand but that would have taken even longer. When I got the words to fit in the space available, I traced them off my computer screen and then "massaged" them to look the way I wanted. I was using the computer to solve spacing issues.

I make my own carbon paper, by using a flat 4B pencil and scribbling on a piece of tracing paper. The reason I do this is, the commercial tracing paper has a kind of waxy graphite that's hard to erase.

Use a kneaded eraser to remove the pencil lines before you do anything else.

Once I had inked in the heading and left space for the signatures below, I knew how much space I had for the body of the text. I don't have a printer that will print an area 8-5/8 x 11-5/8 so I:

1. Opened the Word document my daughter sent me in Google Docs;
   
2. Cut-and-pasted the Google document back into Word (this was because the right-to-left print is touchy in my version of Word and I had to take out all my daughter's formatting and I could only do that in Google docs);
   
3. Using margin formatting, made a space that was 1/2 the size of my intended document and fiddled with the line-spacing and font-size until the Hebrew took up all the space allotted. A traditional ketubah has no paragraphs and is justified right and left - this is so neither party can take advantage of short lines to add things later! For instance, "... will be owed the sum of 10 zuzime AND 10,000 ZUZIM." My daughter says it's like the mega-nega bar on a check.
   
4. Using the free program PrimoPDF, exported a pdf file of the formatted text;
   
5. Pasted the PDF file into an InDesign page which was 8-1/2x11 LANDSCAPE (short side up) and doubled its size;
   
6. Printed half the pdf file on one page and half the pdf file on another page.

I know how to do calligraphy with pen-and-ink, but I decided that was too frightening in this case. What if I made a blotch? For greater control, even though it's much slower, I decided to use a Pigma Micron 03 felt-tip pen with "Archival Ink for Acid-Free Environments." I am drawing the letters rather than using traditional calligraphy. Otherwise I would be holding my breath for hours at a time!

You can see I lightly sketched in the letters using a mechanical pencil, using my printout as a guide for letter-spacing and word-spacing. Then I come back and ink them with the Pigma Micron. Slow but exciting!

I left a lot of space at the bottom intentionally, so the city of Jerusalem would have some breathing room and so my daughter could decide how many signatures she wants to have and how to arrange them. What's left is to punch up the color in a few places and then it's done.

I found that as I got closer and closer to finishing, I was more and more afraid of putting my brush to the paper - what if I made a big mistake at the last minute? The solution was to wait until I was calm. Finally one day I was ready - i put on the final strokes and then took it to Pam-Or Fine Printing to have it scanned.

Now I've cut a piece of masonite 24 x 34 to mount the ketubah. At the wedding, it will be displayed on an easel. Hint (from years of playing at weddings and watching the ketubot blow over in the wind): make sure you have a way to secure the piece securely to the easel and a way to stabilize the easel! I'm going to drill holes in the top and bottom of the masonite and tie it to the easel. I'll make sure somebody is "spotting" the easel at the outdoor service so it doesn't tip over.