How two letters become one Cœura ligature

There's an embroidery book on my desk that I bought from a needlework shop in Oxford. It's a library of monograms and alphabets for combination, printed in France a very long time ago, and on its first plate there's a plain alphabet alongside pairs of letters already woven together, the way a grandmother might have stitched them into the corner of a pillowcase. There's a page near the front explaining how to trace a letter onto cloth: you prick the outline with a pin, lay the paper down, and pounce powder through the holes.

I've looked at that book more than any other book I own as I was embarking on setting up Cœura. It's where The Entwined comes from.

A ligature, in type, is two letters that share a stroke and become one shape… the œ in our name is one. In our studio, we've taken the liberty to take its meaning as: two letters, two people, two forces, held together, becoming one. You can still see both. That's the point. A good ligature isn't a merger. It's a marriage.

The œ ligature being worked out in pencil, two hands on the page

Here's how one gets made. You give us two initials. At the bench, a smith forms them together by hand, turning one to find where the other can give, moving a serif so a stroke can pass through, until the pair sits as one form and both letters are still themselves. No two pairs solve the same way (an R and a J want something different from an M and an E), which is why we don't do it with a machine and why we never will. The hands work the metal, and the metal becomes the piece you chose: a ring, a pendant, a small hoop, a charm.

People ask which initials to use, and the honest answer is: the ones that mean something. Two first names. A first and a last, for a person who's marrying into one. A child's initials with a parent's. Your own two, for the version of you that made it here. The letters are yours; we just find the way they hold.

If you're not sure which two, write to me with the names and I'll tell you honestly how they'll sit. Or begin with your letters here. Either way, we find it together.

Xx, Patti