What Can I Do With My Coat of Arms? Part 12 - In the Home Library

Having looked at a number of ideas for using your coat of arms in your office, today we're going to start a two-part look at using heraldry in your library.

Please keep in mind that while the examples we are going to present here are usages that relate specifically to a library area, many of the suggestions we have made for other parts of the house could be just as appropriately used in the library as well.

So, to begin:

The most obvious feature of a library is, naturally enough, the books contained within it.

One particularly nice, albeit very expensive, way to include your coat of arms is to have them painted into an old-fashioned book of hours, like this:

Or to have your heraldry tooled or engraved on the covers of books.

But those two methods, however appropriate, are generally in excess of the budgetary constraints that most of us have.

Still, do you know what is a great way to heraldically mark your ownership of these books? Why, armorial bookplates, of course!

Heraldic bookplates can and do take many different forms. The examples given below are from a range of years and of several different styles, but here, too, their formatting is really limited only by your own imagination. So let's look at these as a starting place for inspiration, and not limit ourselves to just those types we see here.

These last three examples are ones that I have done for myself, by customizing some heraldic clipart that I purchased on-line.

Do you find any of these examples to be a source of inspiration for how you might use your own coat of arms to create one or more designs for heraldic bookplates?

What Can I Do With My Coat of Arms? Part 11 - In the Home Office

As promised at the end of my previous post, here are a few last ideas for using your coat of arms in the office (whether a home office, or an away-from-home office).

If your office supplies you, and all of your co-workers, with identical looking laptop computers, you may want to differentiate yours somehow. An heraldic sticker can be an ideal way to do just that!

And such stickers can also be used to seal envelopes and packages, or any other use where such a sticker might add some color or decoration. And there will be no disagreements about whose it is.

And speaking of computers and ways to decorate them, it's easy to create a unique, armorial signature block for all of your emails written on and sent from your computer. Here are only two examples of such to get you started on your own:

And finally, there are many ways that heraldry can be used on the computer itself, for example, as a background, or as a screensaver (please ignore the age of the computer in the example here, even though it does look very much like my first PC from way back in the day, complete with a 5¼" floppy disk drive and that big deep cathode ray tube monitor!):

And, of course, a coat of arms is entirely appropriate for use in creating a personal or even a family association website out there on the internet.

I hope that these past few blog posts have given you some ideas about how you could use your coat of arms in your office, or even better, have inspired you to come up with some new ideas for such use on your own!

What Can I Do With My Coat of Arms? Part 10 - In the Home Office

A couple of ideas for using your heraldry in your home office have very likely already occurred to you. But just in case they haven't yet, here's a few possibilities:

Stationery, of course, with your armorial letterhead:

Which is not just limited to the letter paper, but also can be used on cards and envelopes:

And other kinds of notecards:

Heraldry can also be used to create an armorial curriculum vitae, showing off not only your own coat of arms, but those of your employer, education, and other affiliations.

Business cards are an often-used place for a display of your heraldry:

But have you considered that you could also place your arms on your business card holder?

Come back next time for a few final ideas for using your coat of arms in your home office.

What Can I Do With My Coat of Arms? Part 9 - In the Home Office

Continuing our look at some of the things you can do, create, or have created for you in your home office, we find the following:

A little something on the wall behind your desk to remind visitors of who you are and how proud you are of your heritage:

Of course, you may not have the large-size desk that best goes with such a wall decoration, but you can also decorate a small lap desk with your arms:

Which could be accompanied with a wall clock similarly decorated, even utilizing the latest in laser carving:

And for on the desk, an armorial note pad holder (the example here is obviously an older one, given the arms of the Hanoverian Kings of England on its face, but you could certainly update it with your own):

Or a writing folder, which could even be designed to hold your smartphone or tablet:

And speaking of smartphones, did you know that you can get a protective case for a cell phone stamped with your coat of arms and/or crest?

Come back next time as we look at even more items often found in a home office that can display your coat of arms!

What Can I Do With My Coat of Arms? Part 8 - In the Home Office

Moving on, let's look at some of the things you can do with your coat of arms in your home office. Some of these will no doubt seem fairly obvious, but there will also be others that you may not have thought of before now.

First off, let's do a kind of overview, a desk top panorama as it were, of some of the ways that heraldry can be used there.

First we have this little desk set. How many different items do you notice here with the owner's coat of arms? (Please click on the image above, as well as the one below, to go to the full-sized photo to see all of these items in greater detail.)

Looking at this desk set and going from left to right:

While the glass inkwell could have a coat of arms etched onto it, this one does not. (But it could!)

The pen and pencil holder (which might also be just a drinking cup, but let's be real, it has a quill pen and a pencil in it) has a coat of on it.

The bookmark in the book is topped with a coat of arms.

The letter opener next to the book, and then, of course, the paperweight.

And finally, the picture frame with a coat of arms at the top.

This second photo, from Blasoni Nobiliari, an Italian firm which makes many of these and whom you can find on Facebook, has even more armorial items on the table top, though not necessarily strictly limited to the home office.

We have, again, trying to stay from left to right:

a business card holder; a seal matrix; an embossing seal; an embossed business card in an armorial card/placeholder; a small plate; two small paintings of the coat of arms; a paperweight; a shoehorn; a signet ring; a pin plate; a bookmark; a rubber stamp of the coat of arms; a letter opener; a ceramic box; and finally, two glasses with the coat of arm etched onto them.

And to finish up today's post, here are some more seal rings, seal matrices, and the seals they produce, just to give you an idea of some of the many choices that are available at a range of different prices out there.

Next time, some more armorial ideas for the home office!

What Can I Do With My Coat of Arms? Part 7 - Armorial Family Trees

As I noted at the end of my last post, today we're going to look at something that is often used to display a family's heraldry, but one that can take a number of different forms, from fairly simple to extremely complex: the armorial family tree.

I do not doubt that you may have seen one or more armorial family trees in your researches, but have you seen enough to compare some of them, or to notice some of the many different forms they can take? I'm going to give you several examples here of varying complexity and date, without editorializing very much about any of them, just so that you can see some of the ways they can be done, and I hope that one or more of these will inspire you to look at creating one of your own.

So here we go, from the comparatively simple up to the more complex. You will note that many of these family trees are painted with foliage and even trunks sprouting out of the ground, making them literal painted "family" trees:

This next one is a modern example done by heraldic artist Marco Foppoli:

In addition to literal trees, these armorial family ancestors can also be confined within a circle (which has the advantage of perhaps taking up a little less wall space):

Or, if you want to go especially fancy, a mostly-circle done as a peacock's tail, complete with peacock.

Do you find yourself inspired by any of these examples to look at maybe doing one of your own? A nice heraldic family tree can be a great way of displaying your family's heraldry somewhere in your home.