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 ...

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.