Welcome December!

I've been working on collage tags for the Fit To Be Tied® line and thought I'd post a pair to usher in December. These screen-printed '20s cuties were together on a cardboard cutout found in a used bookstore. Wish I could tell you who the publisher and artist are, but there wasn't any info on it. I was attracted to them by the unconventional, yet seasonal, colors.

I cut the card in half to make a matching pair. Behind the girl on the left: antique endpaper and an illustration from Christmas: An American Annual of Christmas Literature and Art, which was published by Augsburg Fortress from 1931 to 1997. Behind the girl on the right: vintage sheet music and recycled wrapping paper. By the way, see the reinforcements at the top of them? Well, I hand color each one. Not kidding.

I'm thinking about how to show - and sell - tags online. It's cumbersome for the blog - there are just too many at a given time - so, it may be time to open my Paper With a Past® Etsy shop. Time to wake up that post-undergraduate studio assistant who's working for me 10 hours a week to pay her room & board while she applies to grad school ...

New! New! New! At Friday's open studio

As noted a few days ago, I've gone tag crazy again. This time, the batch includes a slew of Halloween tags, some with nifty vintage finds. Check them out, sip some wine, munch some cheese and look for some other new surprises in my studio during Brazee Street Studios' open studios 6-9 p.m. tomorrow (Friday Sept. 9). All the details are on the page just below the blog header above - just click on the shaded blue box.

Tag sale!

Well, this week I delivered 90 - yes, 90 - of the Fit To Be Tied® collage tags/bookmarks/whatever to my first retail clients: The Bonbonerie in O'Bryonville and NVISION in Northside. Next: Redtree in Oakley. The orders just about wiped out my inventory, so I whipped up a slew of new tags yesterday and will be working on more next week. Now, if only the Studio Fairy would show up and help me seal, stamp, bag and tag 'em!

Oh, the reason you don't see the hole in most of these is because I am scanning them in before I punch it and add the hand-painted reinforcements. Yeah, another task the Studio Fairy could complete with a swipe of her magic wand.

Yum! More tag mania

Well, I did it. During the past week, I focused solely on one theme for the tags. Food, well, a sub theme: dessert. Even at that, I ended up with an unusual number of cakes. Partly because I'm saving pies for a future project and partly because while combing my archive, I realized how few images of other desserts are in it. Time to shop. Oh, about the circles, its a new shape for the line. I don't think these will be mistaken for bookmarks.

Tag mania

I spent much of last week working on the Fit To Be Tied® line. Each is an original collage and were intended to be gift tags, but since people keep asking if they are book marks I changed the sticker on the package to read: "Gift tag? Bookmark? Greeting card? Framed art? You decide." 

While working on them, I ended up all over the place in terms of theme. That became a problem as I started pulling out papers to fit each new subject. Result: a mess that reached a point where I couldn't find pieces of paper I'd just held. So, I've decided to work on one theme at a time. Today: food.

I'm building up inventory so that I can begin shopping the tags to area retail outlets.

Tagged out

Well, I finished 24 gift tag collages last week. Not to worry, I won't post 'em all. Here are two from the 1950s fashion series that incorporate sewing pattern instructions and vintage ads, in addition to the vintage illustrations and those vintage Dennison gummed reinforcements. Like the others, they'll be tied with vintage seam binding. I'll be selling these in my studio during the next Brazee Street Studios open studios (6-9 p.m., Friday May 13) and am thinking of letting people select their own colors from the dozens of rolls in my stash.

On a tag jag: still working small

Here are two more of the gift tags I'm cranking out this week. I really do need to stop and get back to the pieces for upcoming shows I had been working on - but, I'm just having too much fun delving into a variety of themes from childhood to sewing to baking to typography. So, please bear with me for a few more days.

Collage on a smaller scale

I took a bit of a break from the larger pieces I was struggling with this week to play around with collages as gift tags. It was instantly gratifying and so much fun that I'm creating a line in a variety of shapes and sizes (these are 2.5" x 5.5" each). Like my full-size collages, each is a one-of-a-kind original made from recycled, vintage and antique papers. That's right, they are not prints or photocopies.

The base tags are trashed manila file folders cut by hand, which allows me to vary the size. Topping them off: vintage Dennison notebook reinforcements (it seems impossible to find cloth ones like these any more, so if you know of a source, please e-mail me) and vintage rayon seam binding. Now, all that's left to do is make more and come up with a clever name for the line!