Sean C. Morgan
They enjoy creating beautiful letters, the way scribes did before the invention of the printing press, and 125 of them spent the weekend in Sweet Home.
The 30th annual All-Oregon Calligraphers Conference was held at Sweet Home Junior High School Saturday, drawing visitors from around the state and some from outside Oregon.
Oregon has five calligraphy guilds, said Gretchen Schaleger of Sweet Home. While Sweet Home doesn’t have a guild, it does have a calligraphy class. At conferences, its members are known as the Sweet Home Bunch.
Every two years, the conference rotates to a new location, Schaleger said. This was the second year in Sweet Home, hosted by the Sweet Home Bunch.
“It’s just a time when calligraphers all around share ideas,” she said. They listen to a special speaker and then attend a variety of workshops in the afternoon.
The conference started with a special speaker, Annie Cicale of Ashville, N.C., followed by a PowerPoint presentation on the calligraphy exhibit at the Oregon State Fair and brief discussions on calligraphy.
In the afternoon, those attending went to mini-workshops on a variety of subjects, including calligraphy techniques and other book arts, such as book binding, making greeting cards, chalk dust and using the calligraphy pen to create pictures.
One dealt with the spacing between characters in calligraphy, Schaleger said, and Cicale also provided workshops on Friday and Sunday.
Schaleger has been a calligrapher since 1984, she said. “You might say, it’s beautiful writing, but it dates back to early writing.”
Calligraphy is what the scribes used before the press, and it’s how books were produced, she said. Modern calligraphers are true to the old styles, but they also enjoy modernizing the scripts.
“It’s an art form,” Schaleger said, and pieces are often framed like other types of art. I first got interested in it when I lived in Medford and took the kids to the children’s festival and they did the kids’ names in calligraphy.”
A friend of her mother’s was taking calligraphy classes, Schaleger said, but she couldn’t participate then because they were held when she was busy.
When she moved to Sweet Home, classes there were held at times when she could take them, Schaleger said, and she is among those those who got hooked on it for life.
The Linn-Benton Community College Sweet Home Center runs classes in calligraphy, taught by Schaleger, all year long.
Right now the class has 17 members, but that changes each term depending on what people have going on in their lives, she said.
For information on calligraphy classes, contact the Sweet Home Center at (541) 367-6901.