No, we didn’t buy any sailboat – in fact, we’re clueless about sailing – nor are we dreaming about having our wedding on a boat. This is about another kind of sailboat that somehow makes it to our wedding.
There were those times before we got engaged when I daydreamed of getting married to the man. It was pretty silly and embarrassing but I just couldn’t help it! I guess my heart was trying to tell my brain that I was ready. Well, the first thing that I thought about after the wedding dress was our initials.
I wrote our names in a piece of paper and played around with the letters. I would stare at that piece of paper while squeezing my brain for whatever creative juice it got. You know, I’ve never liked those wedding monograms made by cursive initials. I wanted to design something clean, clever and meaningful out of our initials – ‘A’ and ‘D’. It was quite a challenge combining the two letters because the letter ‘A’ is slanted on both sides, while the letter ‘D’ is straight on one side and curved on the other. I scribbled a lot of variations of ‘A’ and ‘D’ in block letters and tried to find ways to combine the two to make an aesthetically pleasing monogram. I’m not a designer, and you’ve guessed it, I came out with nothing. Nonetheless, it was through this process DAVIDANGITA was first coined and we liked it a lot :)
The quest for our monogram resumed rather unexpectedly. The company I was working for won a tender for an F&B establishment located at a yacht club, and I was part of the branding team for that new restaurant. I was doing my desktop research about yacht clubs, and anything nautical or maritime-related when I chanced upon a simple sketch of a sailboat. I proposed to cut out the back of the wooden dining chairs according to that sketch to accentuate the nautical theme of the restaurant. I was observing the shape of the sailboat cutout when it dawned on me that the sail somewhat looked like an ‘A’ and a ‘D’!
So I grabbed a piece of scrap paper and started drawing. I am not a very artistic person, and my first draft was probably what you could find in geometry textbooks, ha! It was very rigid and symmetrical, almost boring. But I didn’t really mind that. I was contented enough that I managed to combine the two letters. It was obviously simple and clean. I think it was clever in a way that overall it looked like a sail, but it was actually our initials, too. Besides, a sail is a crucial part of a boat, and a boat is often used as a metaphor to talk about life, relationship, and love. So I guess, after more than 6 years of building the boat, we finally got the sail up and stand strong. Isn’t that quite meaningful? ;) Anyway, here’s the sketch of the first draft of our monogram. Pardon the low quality of the photo – it was taken using the notoriously lousy blackberry camera.
We were still not sure if we wanted to include the boat in the monogram, so it was still a sail, not yet a sailboat. Actually, right before David proposed, he drew the sail on the sand of the beach where we got engaged :) A few months later, I even got my engagement ring and his engagement key-ring engraved with the sail monogram :)) The engraving on my engagement ring turned out to be so fine and tiny that you’ll need to view it at a particular angle and bulge your eyes to spot it. I don’t regret it though, even after we scrap that sail monogram, and move on to the second draft and more.