Get Carded: A Sears Roebuck Birthday Card

Hello! My husband's birthday was yesterday, so earlier in the week I was trying to decide what theme I should use for this year's birthday card. For the past few years I'd used facsimiles of vintage animal images, so that was my starting point. 

I browsed through 1800 Woodcuts By Thomas Bewick And His School, a Dover publication with facsimiles of images that had originally been made in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the "Animals" section I encountered an image entitled "The Roe-Buck" and thus my theme was decided. My husband was from a Sears(once called Sears Roebuck) family - his dad and other relatives worked in various capacities for that company, and one of his dad's employees became a close family friend.

And alas, because of the family connection, my husband had recently  read several online articles that reported on the continuing decline of this once-thriving business. It's not been pretty reading by any means.

Besides making a copy of the "roebuck" image, I had a 1947 Sears catalog that I made a photocopy from as well (don't recall where the catalog had come from). And here's how the birthday card turned out:

Materials used:

• white card stock
• "Sears" photocopied from 1947 Sears catalog
• "The Roe-Buck" image photocopied from aforementioned Dover book
• "and" and "happy" stamped onto vintage flashcard pieces
• "say" and "day" cut from vintage children's dictionaries 
• "birth" and exclamation point stamped directly onto card
• "JAN 25 2014" stamped onto vintage flashcard piece

My husband never knows what sort of birthday card I'm going to make him each year - only that it's going to be goofy. He certainly wasn't expecting a Sears Roebuck card theme, but he liked it.