Today the children and I narrowed down the fonts for the apothecary labels. Our criteria for choosing was that the font needed to be readable but still look really old. We started with four possibilities: Edwardian Script, Snell Roundhand, Lucida Blackletter, and Gloucester MT Extra Condensed.
The Gloucester was dismissed immediately as being too modern. Next to go was the Snell Roundhand. I favored the Edwardian because I felt like the Lucida was too hard to read. I printed out our whole apothecary list (inventory?) in the Lucida and we all agreed that it was readable enough.
I have no idea what would look oldy-worldy in Japanese, so all the Japanese will just be in a fairly plain font.
When I first started this project, I googled other people's projects to find out how to create most of this stuff. Several people had carefully detailed the multi-step processes required to create the labels for the jars. Since several of the steps (tea dying, onion skin dying, and painting) require the labels to be wet, they all recommended that you use non-running ink in your printer.
Well my printer only takes one kind of ink so I thought I would just test the ink already in the printer. A little water and page from the font test runs later, and I have a runny, blurry, grey page of smeared ink. I am thinking that this is not the right kind of ink and I am disinclined to get into the homemade ink business. Now I need to consider reversing the printing process: first crumple and age the paper, let it dry, iron all the paper flat, then finally print all the labels.
OR I could just buy 7 sheets of some cool grey or ecru paper and print the labels as is.
While sorting through the fonts, our door bell rang. The boy answered it but there was no one there. Instead he found a brown paper bag with two pieces of paper stapled to it. The first page had instructions that had to be followed carefully if we wanted to avoid being haunted this Halloween. The second, larger page had a hand drawn ghost on it.
Our instructions were to create two similar Halloween bags, ghosts, and instructions and give them out to two neighborhood families by the next night. The paper bag contained Halloween candy. The kids were so happy with this delightful surprise as all the candy was American Candy.
I had two cute Halloween bags from Tokyo Hands. Last time we were there the clerk made a point of giving one to each child so they could use it to go trick or treating. My kids laughed at this concept. The bags are roughly the size of a lunch box. The boy is planning a 30 block assault on the neighborhood carrying a Halloween pillowcase. He has plans to return home and dump his load of candy and head back out. A gift bag is NOT going to be up to this kind of candy-weight stress.
The girl has a smaller bag made of vinyl with reinforced handles. She is targeting specific homes early in the evening, as she wants to be home to hand out the candy.
Needless to say, the Tokyu Hands bags were not going to be used. So we filled them with a little candy, including gummy body parts (heart, brain, lungs), copied the instructions and drew a couple of ghosts.
The ghosts need to be displayed outside your door so that other 'haunters' know you have already been haunted.
The boy packed up the first bag and headed to a neighbors. He quietly set the bag on the doorstep, rang the bell then waited behind a wall to make sure they got it.
With the second family, he waited behind a bush until the boys came out and got the bag.
I have never heard of this tradition. I guess it is most like a Secret Santa. It seems fun and harmless. Hubby did point out that if we took the ghost down, we might get more candy but, for now, the ghost is still up.