I chose Evelyn for her extraordinary beauty. She was 16 in this image and became what would be known today as a supermodel. You can read more about her on other images in the store. I hope you enjoy her. Took a while to get it just right but its still not perfect. 
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North Georgia Made Welcome's Spring on-line shopping event — taking place right HERE, right NOW! Where you will find EVENT SPECIALS, GIVEAWAY CONTEST, FREE PRINTABLES, our WELCOME SPRING COLLECTION and a GUEST FEATURE with north Georgia ACTRESS LYNNE ASHE.
As you can see some really exciting stuff...so sit back on your couch and put it into over drive. You don't want to miss it and also look for any of the Purple link buttons on pages to get there too.
What is it? Quite simply the idea behind it is a new way to write letters to pen-pals for a one time-swap or permanently. You decorate all of the inside pockets of a trading card sleeve (fronts & backs) and send the whole page to someone who wants to swap with you. You can fill the pockets with anything you like (stickers, tea bags, a note, washi tape samples, pictures, etc.) Then you include a short letter/note to your new friend and tuck it in one of the pockets. It's the perfect way to collect letters from pen-pals around the world and a convenient way to store them because they will fit perfectly in a three ring binder! The bonus? You can start a collection of nifty items from around the world by trading with people internationally as well as keep our wonderful post offices a float with this new rage of snail mail. The cool thing about these is after your fill them they will fold down to fit a standard #10 envelope (if you didn't make it too fat lol) and its' not too expensive to send it this way. Just be sure to weigh them out and include the correct amount of postage. How do I make one? First start by purchasing standard trading card inserts used for baseball cards. They are 8.5x11 (inches) and are also referred to as 9 Pocket Page Protectors. You can find these pretty cheap on Amazon or at your local Walmart. I just picked up 100 for 14.00 on Amazon last night. You may want to pick up a few boxes if you are serious about doing this project because I can foresee these increasing in cost, just because of the supply demand. When designing the images and cards/items to fit these 9 individual pockets the image size is 2.5 Wide by 3.5 Tall. You also want to think about designing both the front and back sides of the inside pockets; because when you add them to an album it would be nice to have images on both sides when you flip the pages. You can of course just create some for you or start making bunches of them so you are ready to send one on the fly. According to Janette these pockets also do not hold a PL (Project Life Card; whatever that is). She stated that they needed to be trimmed down. You will be able to find all kinds of images and pocket sized art work here on this site, (in the store, freebies and specials pages) that you can use for your creations! Yea!
The upside is there are some sites where you can join groups and exchange themed pockets right away with others. I found such a group the other night and they are free to join and participate and it also just so happens to be Janette's site which was a happy accident; you can find it here: Pocket Letter Pals . As I said this is a great way to meet new people and make new friends and quickly collect some really cool pockets. Just be careful not to overwhelm yourself with taking on too many at once as you don't want to fall into that Flaker category. So far I have seen Coffee, Owl, Spring themed pocket swaps and so much more. Happy Pocketing and remember to grab some images from the site to get you started. We have a lot to offer and a lot more coming soon!  Winner of April Challenge!   I am starting to get involved with monthly art challenges for fun. They increase web traffic but most of all it stretches the mind and the artistic talents to try and develop items around these challenges. This particular challenge was to use a special blank template that has 8 squares and a circle center for the image as you see above. The idea is to use a digi stamp from DigiStamps4Joy which in this case is the cute image of the park bench in the center and using the template build something around it. Now my idea was to create a card front that you can print out and color however you like to give to whomever or you let the person you give the card to color it themselves if they are an artist. Adult coloring pages are the rage now and I thought it would be fun to create a card around this craze. The cover prints out onto half of 8X10" paper so that you can fold it in half to make a card like you see above. The other thing of important note is that the image I used from DigiStamps4Joy has specifications on how you can use the image. It states you cannot show the image without it being colored in. This of course is to keep people who didn't buy the rights to it from getting the image. However it presented a problem for me based on how I wanted to create my card as I wanted it to be a coloring image. So I decided wouldn't it be fun to colorize the bench put it center and then let you color the rest of the image. That way we appease our wonderful hosts that their image is safe and we accomplish the look we want as well. Plus it hopefully gives you inspiration on coloring the rest of the card which contains all hand drawn elements. I hope you like it as it was a super fun challenge. I will have the card for sale in the store soon so that you can download it. It will have a white background so the images can't be extracted again for protection of our guest image in the center "the park bench"created by Margy. Note just the bench was created by Margy and all imagery around the bench was hand drawn by me. By the By this card also matches our wonderful Garden Series of Adult coloring pages on purpose! What do you think of it? 
First if its super old, musty and moldy...and no not the underwear again... this is not an indicator that it is an antique. Sorry, you can put those panties back in the drawer again. No, wait, the trash please. There you go. Ok back to antiques. Quite simply an antique is considered an “Antique” when according to Merriam Webster an antique is "a relic or object of ancient times" or "a work of art, piece of furniture, or decorative object made at an earlier period and according to various customs laws at least 100 years ago." Ok so there you have it. Your item needs to be classified over a 100 years to priceless ageless to make it fall into the Antique range. There is also a cute online boutique for antique by the name of Ruby Lane. Ruby lane gives us a parallel definition to this, "Most authorities consider the actual definition of the term 'antique' to mean an age of at least 100 years. If an item is not definitively datable to 100 or more years in age, it should not be directly referred to as an antique."
The secondary definition offered is "a period of origin or manufacture" or "length of existence: age." So one could say that my Grandfather's 1928 SS Bugatti is a “Vintage” car. Now Ruby Lane once again offers direction around this term noting that "an item described as 'vintage' should speak of the era in which it was produced. Vintage can mean an item is of a certain period of time, as in "vintage 1950's" but it can also mean (and probably always should) that the item exhibits the best of a certain quality, or qualities, associated with or belonging to that specific era. In other words, for the term vintage to accurately apply to it, an item should be somewhat representational and recognizable as belonging to the era in which it was made." Ruby Lane also suggests that 'vintage' should not be used in reference to objects less than 20 years old. Now based on Ruby Lanes definition the most interesting part of the statement above is the portion that states “In other words, for the term vintage to accurately apply to it, an item should be somewhat representational and recognizable as belonging to the era in which it was made."
 A lot of the images that I offer for free on the Freebies page kind of become a conundrum as they are scanned digital images from True Vintage or Antique items. Can I technically call these digital representations Antiques or 'True Vintage'? What they are scanned from were, yes...but what of the images. They are from today's technology and a digital “representation”. Does this then categorize them as a Vintage Replica? You would almost be inclined to say yes but...what about a “True Vintage” Photograph. It too was just capturing something from that era at the time the image was taken so what makes that image 'True Vintage'? Basically if the image was actually taken during that era I suppose this in itself would classify it as 'True Vintage' because of the photo type, paper used and time it was taken. So then back to the “digital copies” of vintage/antique images. How do we classify them. Without doing any image alterations to the actual subject it could be said that scanning or photographing it “as is” would make it an exact copy but taking a photograph of a Rembrandt doesn’t make it a Rembrandt. It becomes a whole other ball of wax too when you make digital alterations whether to improve or build upon the original image. I think at this point we can all agree that calling these digital images 'Vintage' is a wrong representation for this genre. It needs a classification of its own. I thought briefly of calling it 'Vintage Digital' but that in itself sounds ridiculous. It would be like calling my replicated Tiffany lamp 'Vintage New' or 'New Vintage' or “Old New”...you get the idea its' contradicting. Here is where the issue comes in. Making a digital copy of the image is not actually making a physical replication as no tangible product is made nor implied. Other than the fact there is no physical product in your hand it is a true representation of the original image. This then you could argue makes it a replica but not in the sense that is brought to mind when using the word replication. I envision someone actually painting a painting or building a car to look exactly like the real thing its' modeled after but in the end its a fake. Based on all of this I feel digital imagery of vintage needs an extraordinary classification of it own. Something unique to this budding phenomena that encompasses both altered and non-altered imagery because in the end its not only hard to determine if its been altered or not and doesn’t even matter since its a new genre all onto itself. I was going through the thesaurus looking for words around both vintage and digital. Then it just hit me. It was so simple. A simple name that explains exactly what it simply is; 'Vintage Imagery'. When researching the meaning of Imagery I found the following; “visual images collectively.” and "the impact of computer-generated imagery on contemporary art" or as in this case vintage art. Fabulous! We now have a classification for vintage/antique digital duplication. So what then is Retro? Using our old friend Merriam Webster again who says retro is "relating to, reviving, or being the styles and especially the fashions of the past: fashionably nostalgic or old-fashioned." Huh? Isn’t that just another way of saying vintage? They sound an awful lot like the same thing. I decided to dig into this a little bit further by just googling it. Here is what I found. “Clothes, objects or music whose style or design is imitative of those of the recent past. AH! Ok. IMITATIVE is the key word. So unlike Vintage where things are replicated to look exactly like its parent or is actually from the era, Retro is specifically any current imitations to copy styles, art, objects of the period from which it tries to emulate. In other-words these items are influenced by the styles or feel of the era but don't exactly replicate. So if I were to still be wearing a pair of underwear that I sported in High school I wouldn’t be retro, I would just be outdated and grossed out. Shiver.
This then leaves me to the most recent issue I then have. How to classify a collection of some exceptional papers that I acquired back in 1998 while working for Kinko's. I became obsessed with these papers that have wonderful designs, textures and project possibilities. I just couldn’t get enough of them and yet here I am 17 years later with a collection that not only hasn’t seen the light of day but I may have only used a piece here and there and mostly not at all. Since these papers I would now assume are rare due to the time frame and condition I have decided to share them by dividing them into salable packs so others may not only share but create with these wonderful pieces. But how should they be classified. According to the information we researched above they wont be vintage for three more years. They definitively are not antique nor retro and can't be classified by yet another cliché term collectable. Does anyone actually collect paper to create with? One could almost say that these papers are “almost vintage” lol. My final questions to you. What would you call paper in perfect shape that is 17 years old and what do the terms Antique, Vintage and Retro bring to mind for you? |
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