I get asked often to engrave full words or even 2 lines of text & sentences on my items. It’s been happening so often lately that I thought I should write a blog post about it. I try to be very clear on each piece just how much space I have to work with. In the age of computerized engraving I think most potential customers don’t realize that this is done manually and I am limited with size and space. I can really only comfortably fit 7 characters (letters like this: ABCDEFG) – and in some cases 8 characters (letters like this: ABCDEFGH). This is with the plain font (#3 option above). My script fonts definitely cannot do more than 4 letters on the typical 15mm blank that most of my pieces are made with. Remember that the more letters you add the smaller I have to go, and I will not sell anything that does not look good. The smaller the letters the less detail you can see, and thus it does not look clean or in some cases legible. So if you are going to need a magnifying glass to see it, I won’t be offering it. 😉
With the popular curlz & curlz vintage fonts, they are larger templates and are only intended as a focal initial. That means even at my smallest setting I can only get 2 letters, max on the blank.
I’d love to be able to fulfill all your requests and maybe in the future I will have bigger blanks that will accommodate more text. More text = more work which = more work for me, and potentially higher costs to you. Manual engraving is a skill that I have been honing for 5 years now. It’s not as simple as choosing the right letters and go. I have to position the blank accordingly, gauge what size to go with; often times deciding which of the fonts will look the best (it really does depend on initials vs. a word), and this is all done more by feel and intuition than by measurement. Mistakes do happen, so then I have to scrap that blank and start again. Sometimes I scrap a blank not because I made a mistake per se but because I think I can do better. Many times before I even start on the actual blank I will engrave on a piece of scrap metal first to make sure I have the size and spacing just so. By the time I offer an item to the world I have spent a lot of time perfecting its execution. It’s important to really stick with what the piece is intended to be: an affordable gift with an initial or two, or a simple word with meaning for the intended recipient.
I don’t want to discourage you from contacting me, I love to hear from you all, and if you have a request out of the norm feel free to send me an email. But hopefully this answers some questions in regards to size. 🙂
