Vintage Christmas Gift Tags Free Printable

I collect vintage Christmas tags. I just love the artwork on them. Not all are good for reproducing. Any ones with glitter or foil don't scan well and some are way to difficult to cut out, but there are still quite a few that can be copied and used without ruining the original.

So, as a Christmas gift for you I created a new Vintage Christmas Tag Printable. It's free. Just go to the Vintage Christmas Tags image on Flickr and choose download, and then choose original size.

Print out on your printer and cut and use. Hope you love them as much as I do.

Also, in case you missed the Vintage Christmas Tags printable I made a few years ago, follow that link  and do the same thing to print out that one (seen below)

Looks like I did a couple of repeats. Note to self: Look at this post before doing this next time.

Vintage Color Palettes - Xmas Greetings and A Happy New Year

Here are two Vintage Color Palettes that also wish you a Happy Christmas Season and a very Merry New Year. These are unique colors for Winter Holiday postcards, don't you think? I really like the combo of both of these postcards. Both are from the 1910's. 

The Xmas postcard's hex number colors are from right to left: d1db67, b1d1c6, fb878a, 658a28.

The New Years hex number colors are from top to bottom: b7b156, 9d6d48, ebcec6, b4a6ad.

Not sure what you can do with these color palettes? See this blog post about Using Vintage Color Palettes by Ponyboy Press.

Thank you for following Ponyboy Press over the years. I hope you all have wonderful holidays and a terrific 2015!

Make your own Vintage Custom Christmas Card - Free Printable

I have several personalized Christmas cards from the 1940's-1960's. I love seeing the pictures chosen and the old vintage illustrations, many often handmade. I'm guessing that people bought them from a local photography studio. Some, of course, have clip art and were bought as a template from the photo stores or mail order companies.

I thought it would be fun to make these available to you to use to make your own "vintage" custom Christmas card (these are all actually flats). You could print them and send them or you could just use it as a web post or ecard.

This first card is from 1951 and it has spots for three pictures. It could be a family or kids or pets or a trio of friends. I love how sweetly the boy in this photo is holding his orange cat.

The first thing to do is to download the template. Make sure you download the original size.

Then crop the images you need in a squarish size and fit in squares (the size is roughly 300x300 in 300 dpi).  Then change your images to black and white, add a little sepia and a little noise so it matches the card more. Or you could leave them without the changes, it's up to you. 

I did a couple of samples to see how it looks. The first TV show I thought of that had three people is the show Ben and Kate. It's a new show this fall and I like it a lot. It's about a sister and brother living together and raising her daughter. So I did one for them. Then I did one of just pets because they're cute.

                                

The next one I did was meant for an image of a house or family picture. I like the idea of having an image of a house (of course, I would). Especially if you're sending it to people who know and miss that house or if you recently moved.

This card was sent in 1958 and there was a long message on the back saying the house had been in the family since 1884.  This card has deckle edges. You might want to crop them out and reproduce them on the computer or with fancy edge scissors. As long as the image you use is covering the white square it'll look good. That image size is 823x835 300 dpi. But, of course it could be a bit bigger.

The original size image is here.

Here is a sample that I did with an image that a friend recently posted of their new home. I did all the adjustments to this as with the other one.

I spent probably too much time on this, but you know, sometimes you want to do something just to do it. I hope that some of you might find some use for it. If you use it, I'd love to see what you do. 

Happy Holiday Season!

december days

Here are some images from my December so far.

Hope you all have a wonderful week next week. Happy Holidays to you all!

Vintage Christmas Tags - Free Printable!

I kind of love Christmas Tags. New or used. I have quite a lot (but frustratingly couldn't find half of them recently). Christmas tags are these sweet little pieces of illustration art that can be so perfect and festive.

It's kind of a shame they're thrown away, but that is the nature of them (and why they call it ephemera, right?). If you come across vintage Christmas tags you might have some trepidation actually using them, since they just end up in the trash bag.  However, copies of vintage tags are a great option (especially if you only have one or two of a design). So, I took a handful of my favorite tags and scanned them so you can have a free printable from PonyBoy Press and The Cedar Chest.

 

How to use these:


1. Go to the original size link.
2. Save to your computer (this is a large file, so it might take a minute)
3. Open in a image program or print from the icon. It is made to fit a 8.5 x 11 page at 300 dpi.  
    You do need to change the printer direction to landscape or horizontal.
4. Cut out tags.
5. Have fun!


Happy Winter Holidays to all of you!  Hope your enjoying the season.

zine gifts

I really need to blog about zines more on here. I think about doing it all the time, but then time passes and I forget the zine a bit (I have terrible retention) and then I don't. But, it's Christmas and I wanted to let you know that zines are a great gift for some people, especially young writers who may be inspired to try it themselves. I have met many friends through zines - all in the last 11 years. My life would not be as rich at all without zines and zine friends.

So, on to the zine gift ideas.  Of course, we shall start with my zines. I created a size posi Love your Body pack with 3 zines and some extra fun stuff. Great for any friend who is struggling with feeling shame or hatred over their own  body because they feel they are too big.

Lots of zines, especially perzines can be a little depressing (including some of mine), which can be a great read, but kind of not something you wanna give to someone. I find myself more and more wanting positive zines. Here are some that would make good gifts.

The Radical Uprise  puts out some awesome zines all about how to keep a positive mental attitude. Some of the stuff in the zine can be pretty basic to me, but you never know what people are taught and I think all the zines they put out are great. I highly recommend them and the whole idea of Positive Mental Attitude being a "cool" thing. These zines might help some tweener see PMA in a different light.

In the same vein this zine Shit's Fucked is a great little zine, too. It has some good basic info about how to be a responsible adult and not screw up things for yourself.

This zine is availalbe at the zine distro Ms Valerie Park and there are some other good choices there, too.

     Some other good zines to get for people are D.I.Y. zines. Do they wanna make their own cleaning products? Make Your Place is a beautiful little book which was based off of many zines.

Or maybe they wanna learn screenprinting. Many interests have zines about them and these zines often have tips on how to make these hobbies or do these jobs in a cheaper or greener way. Just go to a zine distro site or Etsy and do a search on the subject your friend is interested in. Maybe it's vintage postcards? Or maybe it's home fermentation.

Cooking zines are also a good option. Does your friend have a obsession with Nutella?  Or tea? Lots of cooking zines out there.

One more kind of zine that is a fun gift is the fanzine. I'm gonna guess that there is a zine for lots of musical acts, writers, books, movies and actors. Like, um....Prince, Justin Bieber, Mary Wollstonecraft, The Golden Girls, Star Trek: The Next Generation....the possibilities are endless.

Zines are a great add-on gift for a theme present. Like a vegan cook zine with some measuring cups or a tea zine with some special tea and a mug.

Anyway, these are just some basic ideas and some zines I really like. Have fun!

christmas tags from family photos

I have to admit to myself that my vision is often bigger and better than my circumstance. I had a great idea of how these Holiday gift tags were gonna look, but due to my small space and lack of good lighting, these images didn't turn out like they should have.

I'm gonna share anyway, because I think it's a good idea. All you need is a color printer and some card stock matte paper (80 # is good). I used a 3" tag puncher that I just got and am pretty into, but you could trace a tag on the back of the image or just cut out in any shape you want. It's a fun idea to have the gift have an old picture of the person the present is for, but you could also use old found photographs.

I got the idea from Sweet Paul magazine. Here's what it looks like when a professional prop stylist takes the pics.

Here's how mine turned out:

You can use non-people images from Christmas past, too. These trees are old Christmas trees of my youth that I scanned from old slides. That's my sister above ripping open a KaBoom present and me in the white fur hat and muff (so necessary for Southern California winters. You never know when it'll hit 65!).

The black and white photo is a found one from my collection.

Hope these inspire you a bit.  Next week I'm gonna have some free vintage printable tags. And check out the post on The Cedar Chest on using copies of vintage cards to make your Holiday cards.

Christmas in the Old West

Christmas is over and New Years has come and gone and I still have not taken down the Christmas decorations or even put away some of my gifts.

I am longing for newness, organization and redoing almost everything, but almost all I seem to be able to do is think about it. I've done a bit of cleaning out, but more of playing with my new wii (!), keeping warm by being under blankets while watching Netflix and catching up with friends - all of these include lots of tea drinking.


My holidays were great. My niece came from Brooklyn and my sister from Southern California. We have a small family and no little kids. About 15 years ago we started a tradition of having a theme for Christmas. We don't always do it for different reasons - but we mostly do.

Some of our favorites were Medieval Christmas, Dutch Christmas, Hungarian Christmas, 1960's Christmas and and last year's 1930's Christmas. We use the theme to determine the menu, activities and music. If it's a time travel Christmas we try and dress up.

This year we did Old West Christmas. This was not nearly as glamorous as last years!


My mother decorated one of the trees all in gold for the gold rush and the other tree in fancy Victorian style ornaments (like you would see in a fancy hotel at the time). We all dressed western - mostly cowboy or prairie style. We had amazing food including pan friend trout, buffalo stew and turkey (I heard the latter two were good. I myself am a pescatarian).

The dog does not eat at the table, but like those folks at the Academy Awards, she fills in the empty seats when someone gets up. She does, however, enjoy getting in costume - just like the rest of us.

Our Christmas themes are lots of fun. We all seem to share the love of a theme, which makes me very happy. It's always neat to see what each other comes up with. We don't have a theme in mind for next year, so let me know if you have any suggestions.

I hope you are enjoying the new year so far. Happy 2011!

it's almost christmas!

The time is closer and hopefully you're ready. I am finishing up some things while The Muppets Christmas Carol keeps me feeling festive and reminds me it's Christmas Eve. All the sudden these last few days it hasn't felt like Christmas to me for some reason.

Are you in need of little boxes for baked goods or small gifts? You can print out the cutest cuckoo clock boxes from My Paper Crane.

If you are finding yourself without gifts and running out of time. Here is a free printable you can use to create some really impressive coupon books for folks, brought to you by the Just Something I Made Blog. She does lots of printables, so check out the blog for more options.

Merry Christmas Everyone! I hope you have a especially nice time this year.

christmas forest

Today has been all about Christmas and I still got stuff to do. Christmas came way too fast this year and I have taken to doing things like printing out new Christmas tags instead of trying to go through my packed closets and find the many, many I already have. Yeah, it's been like that.

Last Sunday I did finally get to the decorating. My nephew came by and kept me company while I untangled Christmas lights and set up the Christmas Forest display. I'm pretty happy with this years new additions (the bright green and turquoise tree - bought to go with the new snowman - and the small orange and pink tree). There are little white lights under the "snow".

The snowman and small trees were purchased from MagpieEthel who I wrote about earlier this month. I just love this little guy and I love the yellow and green colors on him.

The Christmas tree I put up is the same artificial one I have had for the last ten years. It's narrow and small and it works for my small space. But it's getting old and every year I say it's the last year for it, but then the next Christmas comes and I pull it out again.

This cuckoo clock is my newest ornament. I got it last year at that all Christmas store in Lincoln City. I 'm pretty fond of it.

Below is one of the oldest ornaments I have. When I was a kid my mother got a queen ornament (with a hot pink long fluffy skirt) and 2 princess ornaments. Every year my sister and I would put on "our" princesses. It's a very sweet memory. This princess here is about 40 years old! She looks pretty good.

Hope you all are having a nice time getting ready for Christmas. Here it comes!

christmas tag printables

Christmas is a week away! I can hardly believe it. I haven't started wrapping presents and don't even have everything yet. Once again, I resolve to have all my Christmas gifts by September next year. We'll see how that goes.

I think my favorite thing about wrapping presents is the tags. I sort of have a thing about Christmas tags. It's no wonder considering my old paper and ephemera obsession. Oddly, I didn't even think of it as a collection until I saw this collector's book and wow. I sure would love to look through that.

So, as you can imagine, I'm not really in need of Christmas tags, but these new and vintage printable tags make me wish I was.

Here are some really cute printable tags from the illustration Orange You Lucky blog.

From the blog That's Happy, some pretty little birds that could be tags or ornaments.

Creature Comforts blog has a download from some printable tags in 3 color schemes.


And here's some vintage ones on flickr that you could print up.

inspiring christmas journals

If you are interested in starting a Christmas Journal I recently came across some great reconstructed blank books that would be great to use.

Attic Journals is a Portland company and they have some good options. Here are a few I found.
You can do a search on their site for Christmas, Holiday or Santa and you'll get a number of options. If you are in Portland, you can also go visit them at Crafty Wonderland this weekend. I am betting they will have even more journals.

There are some journals on here also made from old craft books. A good idea for a the crafty person on your list.

post thanksgiving

Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. I never participate in going to stores on Black Friday, but I do have my own little post-Thanksgiving rituals I observe. Right now I am watching Home for the Holidays, a movie I often watch after Thanksgiving. A great film. I recommend it.

I also break out the Christmas Journal and start my lists for Christmas. I love having a Christmas Journal. Follow that link to find out more about that.

Last week I got back from a sweet little trip to a nice river view cabin near Mt Hood. The first night we were there we got snow. It was perfect.

I was totally entertained taking flash pictures in the snow. The other worldly mist could be actual fog, my own breath or a snowflake right in front. Any ideas?

All night long I kept getting woken up to loud thuds of snow hitting the roof. In the morning this is what I got to see:

It was a wonderful vacation. I hope you enjoy the rest of your Thanksgiving weekend. Next up, Christmas! I can't believe how fast it's come.