Tag mania! Holiday style.

Just finishing a couple dozen holiday collage tags. This morning, I'll seal, trim and punch them, then, add hand-colored reinforcements and vintage seam binding for the ties. The images - all the original paper, as always - run the gamut, from the Victorian era through the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

I used vintage greeting cards, antique postcards, recycled grocery bags (Trader Joe's shoppers will recognize the woman on the bottom left from the store's holiday bag), vintage Christmas seals, antique and vintage sheet music, vintage sewing pattern illustrations, snowflakes punched from old greeting cards, antique endpaper, recycled wrapping paper (yes, I save all the bits and pieces leftover from wrapping).

They are glued onto recycled manila folders and coasters (the large round ones are the end of a lot of letterpress coasters I bought years ago to use as tags but didn't).

Northside's NVision - newly expanded - will get a batch on Thursday, the rest will be in the studio for my Friday and Saturday Holiday Open Studio.

Latest find: teeny-tiny photo album, circa 1860

I spotted this petite photo album - it measures 5" x 4" - in an antique store in Hillsborough, N.C. a few weeks ago. The cover was falling off. The pages were coming apart. Some photos were missing. Even so, there were hundreds of images in it. Hundreds of teeny-tiny tintypes. Many hand-tinted. A few rare ones of animals. And, rarer still, African-Americans.

Just had to have it, and at $45 it was a bargain. There is no identification on the images and no text anywhere in the album to give an idea of who these people are. I suspect it may have been a photographer's sample album. It's easy to tell from the clothing and hair that the photos were taken in the late 1850s/1860s, when tintypes were just becoming popular.

How will I use these? No clue ... yet.  

Garden of anatomical delights

Tender Cares. That's the name of the collage this detail is taken from. (Yeah, still have a larger scanner on my Wish List.) It's part of an untitled series in which I give genteel Victorian/Edwardian era illustrations of women a sharp twist. They're for the exhibit Pulp Art, which opens at The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center on Jan. 11.

The original engraving was actually titled Tender Cares - and by the time I finished the piece it seemed like an apt - and wonderfully ironic - name. The image was plucked from The Royal Chatterbox (1881), a beautiful, oversized picture book for children spun off from Britain's Chatterbox magazine. It's been languishing in the attic, because I just couldn't take it apart. I'm, obviously, over that.

The cutting is more complex in these collages than anything I've attempted in the past. The anatomical illustrations are from a variety of antique books, including a few different editions of Gray's Anatomy. The background is another one of those made in 2010 at a Greater Cincinnati Calligraphy Guild workshop on creating background surfaces. Everything created then was stashed away in a box that I rediscovered while was working on the bomb series.
 
One more thing: These collages are larger than past ones. Not huge, mind you, but bigger. I expect them to be 18" x 22" when framed.

Hot off the letterpress ...

Ring, ring, a-ling. I fell in love with the pageboy/girl above from the moment I saw him/her in a nursery rhyme book that belonged to my late mother-in-law. I knew immediately that the illustration - unsigned, by the way - would make a wonderful holiday card. After scanning it, the colors were altered so the hat ribbon and feather became red; and the inside of the sleeves, pale green. I cleaned it up (look closely and you'll see that it's slightly out of register), resized it, printed it and sent it as a New Year's party invitation.

I couldn't get it out of my head. A year or so later, I revisited the image with the idea of paring it down to its essence and printing it on a letterpress. The result? See below. 

At the same time I was doing that, I scanned a half dozen antique and vintage card borders. The plan was to make business cards. By the time I finished printing them, though, I didn't want to use them as business cards. So, they sat in the attic, until a few weeks ago, when it hit me that they'd make terrific gift tags.

Look for both the cards and the tags - and more - at this weekend's annual Showcase of Arts at the Woman's Art Club of Cincinnati. I'll be there just one of two days: 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Saturday Dec. 1.  

Letterpress printed. Blank inside. Packaged with an envelope.
$4 each.
Signed, limited edition.

Letterpress printed. Tied with red, green or brown baker's twine.12 to a package (two of each design); $8.
Limited edition. 

Victor/Victorians are out of the closet

The Victor Victorian series I wrote about in September - has it really been that long? - has been at the framer for quite some time now. But not just any framer. Tim Leslie, above, and Chip Doyle have been working on selecting just-the-right frames from their extensive cache of antiques. Not an easy task. I visited a few times to look over the selections, then, left it in their capable hands.

Well, they got it done - and quite beautifully, too. I had a chance to view the finished pieces last night in a back room at HighStreet, where I was attaching labels to them. Tim quite generously put a bug in owner Leah Spurrier's ear about the collages - he thought they were a perfect fit for her shop, whose motto is "Fierce objects, design, and London style" - she liked them and will be hanging them any minute.

I'm not sure where in the expansive store they will be and how many of them she will be selling. So, stay tuned ...