Our Designer of the Month Nicole Black recently offered a penmanship class with Southern Fried Paper, and she’ll be offering more classes again soon! Today we’re sharing details on what Nicole’s class entails, along with some quick tips for how to improve your own penmanship. We love how the class began: out of a love for beautiful, heartfelt words, carefully crafted with patience and pride. We’ll let Nicole take over from here!

This is a traditional penmanship class.  One that will teach you how to write with the grace of our grandmothers or great grandmothers. To slow down and think about each letter and each word and make them count to make a meaningful statement that the recipient will enjoy reading.

We spend some quality time on the foundations: doing warm up drills and learning the basic hand motions. Lower case and capital letters are covered in this class so you can leave able to write notes. Not to leave you hanging there, we go over connecting letters, making words, writing sentences and how to write a traditional letter (by hand!).

Everyone gets a one-on-one progress review to help work out any trouble areas. For those afraid you will forget what we have learned — a wonderful class booklet is provided along with a pen, notepad and pencils. 

We end the class with a pen round table where the participants get to test out different pens to find their favorite… because what works for your neighbor may not be your favorite. 

Quick and easy tips for improving your penmanship at home – slow down! Develop a rhythm of writing and stick to it, slow down with the pen and you will see an ease of flow with the letters develop. Also, it is okay to write on lined paper.  I’m a seasoned letter writer and still use guides to keep my lines straight. If you want to write on unlined correspondence paper – just place a piece of notebook paper underneath and follow the lines.  When you are finished, you have written in straight lines without them being there and your recipient will be soooo impressed!

Many thanks to Nicole for sharing a peek inside her penmanship workshop! Looks fun, doesn’t it? Be sure to check out Nicole’s designs this month – they’re on sale through the end of February (and Bella Figura customers save on calligraphy addressing from Nicole, too!).