Our son is getting married in a few weeks to a wonderful young woman in D.C., and we spent this past weekend working on wedding gifts and favors for the guests that incorporate both their Irish and Hindu heritage. Our daughter thought of the idea of screenprinting an Irish and Hindu blessing on a piece of Irish linen. I thought it would be cool to create their own custom image of interlocking Irish love knots and the Ohm, the sacred Hindu symbol. Here’s what I came up with:

It was a fun exercise after so many weeks of intense corporate design work to do something creative and personal. I liked the idea of incorporating a heart into the mix too. I may tweak my line weights a little more to equalize the white space, and perhaps try to get the Ohm in the center to appear to be part of the continuous interlocking rope. What’s stopped me from messing too much with the Ohm is that I don’t know how far you can stylize it while still retaining its meaning. I don’t want to end up making it read “Bite the wax tadpole.”

Here were some of my preliminary sketches. I ended up deciding on encasing it in a circular shape instead of a triangle because a circle is a more eternal shape, and more peaceful to me than a triangle or something with too many points:

There is one spot that is driving me a bit crazy because I had to break the continuous knot in order to form the outer line of the heart:

But I decided to let it just disappear into the fold of the loop and forget about it. More important is the appearance of the continuous knot, the evenness of the space, and the feeling of balance.

Okay, back to my regularly scheduled work now…