Last December marked the first holiday season without my beloved mother, Kathleen. Yesterday in a text message, Lisa (my oldest sister) pasted a recipe for some cookies that my Mom used to make every year around Christmas time and said:

“I love having things with her handwriting. I miss her”

This got me thinking… I looked into it, and it’s possible to create a custom font based on someone’s handwriting. So I spent some time digitizing and formatting Mom’s handwritten recipes and cards into a font named “Kathleen Regular” – named after our wonderful mother, of course.

Now we can use Mom’s handwriting to write our own recipes, cards, or anything we want. It feels like a small way to keep her memory woven into the fabric of our daily lives.

So I’m proudly releasing the Kathleen Regular font free for public use in hopes it brings other families some piece of what I feel when I use Mom’s handwriting. I find comfort in imagining her handwriting living on to inspire. Mom always brought people together with food, warmth, and kindness. So I can think of no better legacy for her font than to spread more of that loving energy into the world.

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Here’s a preview

Here’s a preview of the font using “Hoefler’s Proof: Lowercase 1.0”:

The kerning still isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I feel like it captures the essence of her handwriting really well.

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Steps to create your own custom font

If you’re interested in doing something similar, here are the steps I took:

1) Gather a bunch of writing examples

When I first got married, my mom made a cookbook with some of my favorite recipes for Liesl and I to have. I used this cookbook as the source material for this font. Here are some examples:

I literally just found a place with good lighting and took pictures of each page with my iPhone.

2) Sign up for Calligraphr.com

https://www.calligraphr.com/ is an amazing little app. You download templates that you can paste individual letters into, then upload these templates back into the app where you can make further adjustments before compiling your new font. This app does all of the heavy lifting for you. I signed up for 1 month of the premium plan so that I could fine tune a few things not available in the free plan.

3) Open each image up in Adobe Illustrator

I actually don’t have Illustrator on my computer, so I just signed up for the 7-day free trial and downloaded it. I already cancelled the subscription to avoid being charged.

In illustrator, you want to:

• Open Your Image: In Illustrator, go to File > Open and select your handwriting image.
• Select the Image: Click on the image to select it.
• Open the Image Trace Panel: Go to Window > Image Trace to open the tracing options.
• Choose Preset: For handwriting, you might start with the Black and White Logo preset.
• Adjust Settings: Use the sliders to adjust the Threshold to get the right balance of black and white. I set it to 139.
• Preview the Trace: Check the Preview box to see the results live as you adjust the settings.
• Trace: Once you’re happy with the settings, click Trace.
• Expand: To turn the trace into actual vector paths, click Expand in the “Object” menu at the top of the screen.
• Ungroup: If the vector is grouped, right-click and select Ungroup.
• Select the Letter: Use the selection tools to select the letter you want to vectorize.
• Copy and Paste: Copy the selected letter and paste it into a new document or artboard to work on it separately.

Here’s an example of what you end up seeing:

4) Upload completed templates

Fill out the templates provided by Calligraphr.com. Here’s an example of my completed templates after I extracted every individual letter (both upper case and lower case) from my Mom’s recipe book. Once completed, upload them to the Calligraphr app.

Once you build your font, you’ll see individual letters that need adjustments (which you can make directly in the Calligraphr app). Like I said, I used the “Hoefler’s Proof: Lowercase 1.0” to preview my font and look for areas that could be refined. Once you’re happy, you can download your font in two formats:

Even though she can’t be here physically, through little things like this, we’ll always carry pieces of Mom in our hearts. Love you Mom!