March On!

March is here, and so is our new trade card calendar featuring our young French chef (we call him Gaston) and his culinary capers.

With March comes the first of our spring classes, beginning with three days of calligraphy with Bill Kemp. Bill's classes mark an auspicious start to this season in the Studio for the Imagination, as he will return in April to help Michael Sull teach the week-long Advanced Spencerian Saga.

There are only a few weeks left to see our current gallery show, "Prints, Charming," so do come by if you haven't been yet. We'll be taking the show down March 18 in preparation for our next exhibit -- stay tuned for details!

And finally, we're all breathing a sigh of relief because Easter is not until the first weekend in April this year. That means we have all of March for crafting and painting eggs.

Welcome to February!

Today kicks off a momentous month at Castle in the Air, as this morning we unveiled our new gallery show and this afternoon we took our spring class mailer to press. Both the gallery exhibit and the upcoming classes are spectacular (if we do say so ourselves!), but don't take our word for it. Come on by the shop and see for yourself. You can pick up one of our whimsical new monthly calendar trade cards, too, the first in a series featuring a junior French chef who will be getting into all sorts of trouble over the coming months.

The Trade Card Trade

Beginning in the late 18th century, merchants in Europe and America advertised their shops and wares on small cards they would hand to customers. With the rise of lithography printing in the Victorian age, producing colorful trade cards became very inexpensive, and collecting these cards grew into a popular hobby. Collectors would swap their favorites among friends or paste them into their scrapbooks.


















Collecting trade cards is hobby that was wildly popular in the Victorian era, but the phenomenon didn't last very far into the 20th century, as retailers took advantage of newer forms of advertising such as catalogs and magazine advertising.

















We've got our own secret stash of vintage trade cards at Castle in the Air, and this month we've begun reissuing them for our customers as part of our postcard selection. And as a special treat for our regular visitors, we are giving away our own series of free trade cards -- one for each month -- with a calendar of that month printed on it. The first one is pictured at the top of this post. Come by and collect them all!