Free Spring Ephemera Downloads

As a celebration of the coming Easter holiday, and the arrival of spring, I wanted to offer my friends and customers these ephemera downloads to use in your fiber and mixed media projects.

To download, click on the image to bring up its full-size version, then right-click (or click and hold on a Mac) and save the high resolution JPG to your computer.

Above, Taylor's Premium Cologne trade advertising card — click image for full size download.

Above, The Woolson's Spice Company's Easter Greeting trade advertising card — click for full size download.

These are selections from my large — and ever-growing — collection of vintage postcards and advertising trade cards. When I come across beautiful examples at estate and yard sales, I just can’t resist them!

As those of you who know my work are aware, I love to print these vintage images onto fabric and build an art quilt around them, or create fabric postcards or Artist Trading Cards(ATCs). I print my image straight onto fabric using products designed for use with your home printer, or use Transfer Artist Paper (TAP) to transfer onto Lutradur, and then match it up with new or vintage fabric, trims and embellishments, and start stitching!

If you are traveling for spring break or to visit family or friends this weekend, I wish you safe travels and warm spring weather. (With the kind of winter we’ve had, which has hung on so long here on the East Coast), that last is no guarantee, I know!)

About Advertising Trade Cards

The following is excerpted from “Brief History of Trade Cards” by Ben Crane from The Trade Card Place. The invention and popularization of color lithography meant that advertising trade cards became plentiful and by the 1880s, they had become a dominant method of advertising products and services. “A trip to the store usually brought back some of these attractive, brightly colored cards to be pasted into a scrapbook... Some of the products most heavily advertised by trade cards were in the categories of: medicine, food, tobacco, clothing, household, sewing, stoves, and farm. The popularity of trade cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color, such as magazines, became more cost effective.”