I always wanted an inkwell and a feather quill. Blame it on Anne of Green Gables or on A Little Princess, or any other old-fashioned piece of literature that I modeled my childhood aspirations after, but my imagination was bursting with fantasies of filling leather bound books with fluid, black letters, the sound of a nib scratching furiously against rough-hewn paper.

Of course, my father refused. In his mind, an inkwell might as well have been an indelible stain, ready to explode all over the carpet at any given moment (and with my little brother’s track record, he was probably right). So when a few of my soon-to-be-married friends recently started talking about calligraphy and addressing their own wedding invitations, my interest immediately was piqued. I suddenly remembered all those fantasies I shelved decades ago. I’m not gonna lie, as soon as that box from Amazon arrived on my doorstep and I pulled out my new calligraphy toys, I thought, “HA! I’m an adult now —  I can do what I want!”

But how to learn calligraphy? After some fruitless searches on YouTube and struggling to follow along with a few blog posts, I ended up buying Melissa Esplin’s online calligraphy course, which, if you want to learn calligraphy in a short period of time, I would highly recommend. The production quality is kinda sub-par (keep in mind, I work at Craftsy, which is known for high-quality online craft education, so call me picky), but her content is spot-on. I saw immediate improvement.

I still have a long way to go before my lettering looks like Melissa’s, but I’ll take progress wherever I can get it. And, hey, now I can even address my own wedding invitations.