Today’s Unicode calligraphy entry is the kanji for “seat” 座. This one was difficult to write legibly: CJK characters are supposed to be written with a brush, which has a very different pattern of stroke width variation than a Western flat-tip calligraphy pen.

The seat character consists of four components, two of which (人) can represent people. A graphical pun based on rearranging the parts of 座 to evoke “social distancing” won the annual Kanji Creation contest for 2020.

Today’s Unicode calligraphy is a roman numeral I had no idea existed!

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As it turns out, the system of Roman numerals I learned as a child (I=1, V=5, X=10, L=50, C=100, D=500, and M=1000) is a medieval standard. The ancient Romans did not often write numbers much larger than a hundred, and when they did, they used a slightly different system.

Composite symbols with a backwards C were used for big numbers: IↃ=500, CIↃ=1000, IↃↃ=5000, and CCIↃↃ = 10000. The modern numeral for five hundred, “D”, comes from writing IↃ more concisely. There are also concise forms for one thousand (ↀ), five thousand (ↁ), and ten thousand (ↂ) although those forms are now of only historical interest.

Yūzen (友禅) is a kimono dyeing technique that involves painting a pattern on the fabric inside the outlines drawn with a resist paste to prevent the dye areas from mixing together. In Kanazawa, we had the opportunity to learn and practice yūzen with the kind help of artist Hirano Toshiaki (平野利明) at the Yuzen Yomei studio.

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Kaga yūzen — the style of yūzen unique to the historic province of Kaga — is characterized by lifelike designs such as insect-nibbled leaves.

Although less time-consuming than earlier freehand techniques, yūzen is still a skill-intensive multi-step process. Thankfully, the artisans at Yūzen Yomei made things easy for us by creating and outlining the designs ahead of time, so we only needed to worry about the colouring process.

We are incredibly grateful to Hirano-sensei for welcoming us into the studio. It was a very special experience — the highlight of the entire trip — and I hope to one day return to see them again!

I need to practice my calligraphic dots and circles, so today’s character comes from Braille.

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Did you know that Braille is slightly different in every language? The twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet are generally the same across languages, but beyond that there is a lot of variation. For example, I wrote ⠩, which represents:

• the digraph “sh” or the word “shall” in English Braille,
• sounds similar to “sh” in Devanagari Braille (श) and Arabic Braille (ش),
• the accented letter î in French Braille,
• the digraph “ei” in German Braille and its equivalent “ει” in Greek Braille, and
• nothing at all in Spanish Braille!

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have their own entirely independent Brailles. The symbol ⠩ represents the syllable く (ku) in Japanese Braille, the final “yan” in Mainland Chinese Braille, and the vowel ㅠ (yu) in Korean Braille.

I visited the Ochanomizu Origami Kaikan (お茶の水おりがみ会館) as a fun little diversion in Tōkyō. The centre is part shop, part school, and part studio. I got to take some photos of the paper-dying process and took home some supplies that might inspire me to make some more origami soon!

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Origami paper can be dyed, painted, or both depending on the intended pattern. When I visited, the artisan was using a special multi-headed brush to paint green stripes on one side of the paper; the other side had already been painted gold using a very wide, soft brush to achieve a consistent finish. The result is a pattern perfect for folding into snake decorations for the upcoming new year!

Calligraphy is one of several hobbies I’ve started dabbling with. I’m practicing by writing information sheets for random Unicode characters, which gives me an excuse to share some typographic trivia!

Today’s entry is U+237C RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW, also known as angzarr. This is an unusual “ghost character” that nobody knows the meaning of. Jonathan Chan has an ongoing series of blog posts tracing the history of the character to the Monotype foundry between 1954 and 1963, but is no closer to discovering the original purpose.

Before we left for Japan, I tried my hand at making my own stamp to use on the cover page of my eki stamp book. I think it turned out pretty well for my first attempt!

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The stamp is made out of a 1/8” thick rubber gasket material. I used an X-Acto knife to carve it into a stylized rose design, glued it onto a wooden coaster, and sanded it down a bit to allow ink to stick to it.

In 2007, New Zealand paint company Resene decided to name this specific shade of teal “zomp”.

Leah and I have really gotten into Magic: the Gathering. Our favourite ways to play are sealed deck and Jumpstart, both of which involve opening new packs and making decks out of what you open.

Since it would be wasteful (not to mention expensive) to buy new cards every time we play, we only buy a certain number of packs each set and re-use the cards we open to make our own packs for later games.

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We originally tried coin envelopes and a product called Cubeamajigs, but neither was as nice or convenient as the side-loading papercraft boxes I made with my Cricut.

The above SVG image can be imported into Cricut Design Space to make boxes of your own. Or, if you want to make a box with different dimensions, a tool called Templatemaker can make similar patterns.