What Can I Do With My Coat of Arms?

A question that comes up only occasionally, but one that I think ought to be talked about more than it is, is the issue of, once having obtained a coat of arms (whether through inheritance, through a grant from an heraldic authority, through registration with one of the several regional and international registries, or through self-assumption), what can you do with said coat of arms?

A few suggestions crop up on a regular basis: have a banner made, frame the grant or other document and hang it in your home, have a table banner or table shield made, make a bookplate (or bookplates) with the arms, and a few others.

Well, over the years I have run across (and saved images of) many of the ways that people have used their coat of arms, and in these next several posts, I will be sharing them with you.

Now, this is not to say that even this fairly wide selection is comprehensive; indeed, heraldry can be found used in just about any way that someone's imagination can come up with. But I offer the examples I will be sharing here as a springboard for your own imaginations about the possibilities.

But I will begin with just this one:

As an adjunct to what you can do with your coat of arms, I will also remind people here that, specific grant or not, there is always more than one way to depict a coat of arms, depending upon the specific artist's personal style and/or if the owner wants to mimic the heraldic style of a specific time or era (the image below courtesy of Pro Heraldica in Stuttgart, Germany):

Anyway, stayed tuned for next time, when we begin this series on "What can I do with my coat of arms?"