Well, not me. I’m not going anywhere. But some of my older products have reached their golden years and being packed away for the retirement home (ie the archives box) soon. This spring I’ve been busy working on new products and some revamped designs of the older ones. I’ve shared a few previews of new cards on Facebook and Twitter and will continue to do so as I finalize designs and send away for plates. This process will continue throughout the year, until (hopefully) by the holidays most of the products currently available will either be retired or look very different.
But what does this mean? I’m not ready to share all my plans yet since many ideas are still in the early stages. Just know that there will be lots of changes happening this year. But, have no fear, I won’t be changing or discontinuing anything without announcing it here first and giving you a chance to gobble up any remaining stock at special discounted rates.
So, without further adieu, I’m ready to announce that the first of my products to be retired/revamped are…
…my Polish folk art bird card sets. That’s right, I’m changing one of my best-selling products. These cards date back to my very first letterpress project, a book of Polish proverbs hand set in both Polish and English with accompanying linoleum carvings. The linocuts were all motifs from Polish wycinanki, mostly birds printed from a single block each in one color.
In the earliest days of Pressbound I turned several of those carvings into cards to test the waters. As my business grew I took three of those birds and designed a fourth, packaging them together as the current set. These sets were printed from the original linoleum blocks. But as my printing skills grew I saw how these could evolve if I turned them into polymer plates and added a second color. I just needed to find the time to make the new designs and this month I finally did!
As you can see, these are the same birds but produced in a much different way. The image is no longer solid and has details I could not produce in a linoleum cut. Plus they are two colors! A few other differences that you can’t see yet: they’re going to be a size smaller, moving down to 4Bar (5 x 3.5) from A2 (5.5 x 4.25), they will be printed on bamboo paper with a slight off-white hue (currently printed on a bright white cotton sheet), and they will be packaged in sets of 6 with all the cards having the same design/image (currently you get one of each). It’s been really difficult trying to sell the old set with 4 different cards. I’ve seen how much it confuses people when I sell at craft fairs and can imagine how confusing it would be if I were to wholesale these eventually and not physically be there to explain it each time. The advantages of packing the same design in each set is that each new bird design will have it’s own color scheme. There will be three different bird sets to chose from (I’m getting rid of the bird I didn’t like as much).
Plates for these are coming my way this week, maybe even today. I’ll be posting more on the printing of these cards in a few weeks. I hope to have the new bird cards sets debut at Craftopia on April 28 and on Etsy by the end of the month as well. Until then you can get the older sets at a special reduced rate. Check out the Etsy shop for more info!
[...] my older folk art bird cards and launching these newly revamped cards, you can read more about that here. The old cards are still available but only for a very limited time at a discounted rate in the [...]