In march, just off the heels of a wonderful meet-up with friends in Vegas, I got this idea that we need to exchange pangrams at the upcoming IAMPETH (the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting) convention. Selfishly I want to collect originals or prints from among the greatest and most passionate penmen and women. The most common pangram out there is "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog". It's one of the shortest sentences that (a) makes sense and (b) uses all the letters of the alphabet. Surely I had plenty of time to design something epic with lots of color, fun printing and gold foil, but that didn't happen. Working in advance never happens. Coming up with my own pangram seemed so daunting a task that I put it off. I had found an awesome pangram in a book I inherited from my great, great grandfather: "Go! Lazy fat vixen, be shrewd! Jump quick!" But for some reason the layout wasn't jiving with me. I wasn't connecting with the words. Then I thought of jazz hands. I busted out the pencil and started writing. I wrote the alphabet down and I started to put words together with the tougher letters to use in a sentence. It just came together. And I think it speaks to who I am as well. I'm not one for clever prose, but I was proud I came up with this by myself. The design ended up being a bit of a fiasco as well. I wrote it out, scanned it and printed the piece as-is. I used a sepia ink to get some slight variations, but my hairlines were too thin for the digital printer. Wa, Wa. Saying your hairlines are too thin is like a body builder saying that their one-rep max squat wasn't heavy enough. It's a blessed problem to have. But I was down to the wire. I had 3 days before I left for Tennessee to get the piece printed. I put on my big girl pants, dusted off my wacom tablet and vectorized the whole thing. It took about 3 hours. I printed it. THEN after I printed them, I showed up to IAMPETH with the cards and I wasn't happy with them. So I added more flourishes to each one (you can see above the lines in the corners that aren't perfectly smooth) and little bits of silver foil from my hot foil pen and called it a day. I'm pretty pleased it didn't all blow up in my face considering how last-minute it all was. I was impressed at how amazing and creative the pangrams were. Many were done by hand! Incredible. So, I've got a few extra. If you'd like to do a little pangram trade, fill out the below*. *While supplies last. Your information will not be shared with anyone.