starting to return to normal

For the last month or so I've been busy working on my zine for the Portland Zine Symposium. This is why things have been so quite here.

The zine I made this year is all about Vintage Postcards! I wanted to do some outreach, teach some folks about them and tell them why they're so neat. People seemed to be really interested in them at the symposium and I even gave away some applications to the local Postcard Club.

If you read this blog, you probably already are a collector, but if you're interested I thought I'd let you know about the new zine. Below is a picture of my table at the zine symposium last weekend. You can read more about that on my other blog here.

This new issue of my hodge-podge themed zine Paper Crush is Paper Crush #4. Each zine comes with a free vintage postcard. You can find it at here on The Cedar Chest shop.

Now, I am working on getting the house and my life back in order. A back injury and a cold haven't helped me much. Hopefully, I'll be posting more postcards and photographs soon.

freedom

Hope you are all having a nice 4th of July. I am using the day today to get to something I have meant to do for a while now.

A few months ago I got a box of vintage postcards from about a hundred years ago. All of them are very distressed and have holes in them. Every single one! What is that about? I have no idea, but I quickly realized that there is some freedom in the damaged postcards. If you like to use vintage postcards for your artwork, these are perfect. I always feel bad cutting up or gluing down a perfectly beautiful old postcard. I mean it survived 100 years or more and now I am going to just cut it up? But, these postcards are already damaged, so no guilt.


The other thing that is neat about these cards is how they look. I like the stained, distressed look of them. And this is real, too, not that tea stained manufactured distressed look.



You can see here a couple that happily fit the theme of the day. I have some listed on my Etsy shop, too. You get 10 assorted distressed postcards for only $3.00!

postcard weekend

Here are some photos from the Postcard Auction and Sale last weekend.

I had never participated in an auction before and my experience was just like a typical first experience I have seen shown on TV or in the movies. I like to think that didn't influence me but, I'll never know.

First it felt hard to catch up with the bidding and the auctioneer and things got past the amount I could pay pretty fast. Then I finally won one at a good price (a full scrapbook) and it was pretty fun. Then I got another (another scrapbook) and then I bought some postcards for more than I would of because I just got excited and it was fun to raise my hand!



There were a couple things I really wish I would have gotten and the lesson I learned there was to look over the things being auctioned over better beforehand and to keep a list. With over 150 lots it was a lot to keep track of. It was a lot of fun and the dinner was great, too.


The next two days was the postcard show. I spent a few hours there looking through people's stuff. There was some neat stuff to see.

Some neat old advertising signs that were used on the sides on trolleys in Portland.

A strange cookbook that was a pink plastic puffy cover of a 3 ring binder. The recipe pages were not nearly as interesting as the cover. Maybe pride was a brand. I didn't investigate enough.


The Webfooters auction and sale happens every year. You can find out more about it here.

autumn picnic

This postcard was written to Lee Leighton and was sent to San Jose, California on November 12, 1906. It was sent from Seaside, Oregon.

To My Dear Aunt

Being a Aunt, I am very fond of pretty vintage postcards made just for Aunts. I have a few of them. This one is especially pretty and has a curious message. It has no address or stamp and is written in pencil and cursive. It looks like an adults writing.

I know you dont lik me but accept this card for good luck.


And here is another picture postcard sent to an Aunt



Best Wishes to all for a Merry Christmas 815 Grant St

Dear Aunt,

Received your letter. Was glad to hear from you. I am enjoying married life in the nicest way and getting along fine. I have a lovely man and a nice home and he is so good to me. This is our picture. Fannie

To: Mrs Susan Yoder, Middlebury, Ind RR no 1
Postmark: Springfield, Ohio Dec 23 1911

Something I like to do is look up some of the addresses on these old postcards. Many do not have full addresses, but this on does in the return address. If you want to see where Fannie and her new husband lived, click here.

postcard show this weekend in portland

I am not sure how many if you are in the Portland area, but I wanted you to know about the annual Webfooters Postcard Show and Sale. I am a new member of the Webfooters. The Webfooters have been a postcard club since 1966.

The shows are great fun if your idea of fun is looking through boxes of old postcards, photos and ephemera and chatting with people who are into the same thing. As you can imagine, this is my idea of fun. You can find things from 25 cents to 25 dollars or more. Hope you can come by.

Postcard Collection at the Met

Wow, how neat is this. A postcard collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art! Opens tomorrow.

Curator Jeff L. Rosenheim of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Department of Photographs arranges a display of postcards collected by Walker Evans that are part of the exhibition 'Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard,' in New York, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009. Long before he picked up the camera and became a pioneer of American documentary photography, Evans began collecting the colorized photo postcards that were a staple of early 1900s five-and-dime stores. The exhibition of his collection opens to the public Tuesday, Feb. 3

From the Museum Website:

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
February 3, 2009–May 25, 2009
The Howard Gilman Gallery
This exhibition will focus on a collection of 9,000 picture postcards amassed and classified by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975), now part of the Metropolitan’s Walker Evans Archive. The picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development. The dynamic installation of hundreds of American postcards drawn from Evans’s collection will reveal the symbiotic relationship between Evans’s own art and his interest in the style of the postcard. This will also be demonstrated with a selection of about a dozen of his own photographs printed in 1936 on postcard format photographic paper.