old-fashioned calling cards

I've always rather liked the idea of calling cards. I thought it would be fun to design some for an imaginary character, so I created a Design a Calling Card swap for our fairy tale group. My partner Candy is an enormously talented artist, so it was great fun to plan this for her (along with another swap I'll share later).

One of my favorite fairy tales is The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen, and I thought it would be neat to make a set of cards for the Emperor. I found an old illustration of a nightingale I liked by J.F. Naumann and printed it out along with a quote onto textured card stock. The cards were still rather flimsy, so I spray mounted them onto another sheet of card stock before I cut them up, which worked really nicely. I liked the weightiness of the card, which felt appropriately formal and elegant.

I thought these would also make really pretty tags, so I printed out a few extra ones without the text and put them into a tiny envelope along with a letter from the Emperor, written to the young maiden who first found the nightingale for him.

As luck would have it, I was also able to find a nice hardback copy of the book on sale at a library bookshop, so I wrapped everything up in gold tissue paper tied with red ribbon--which is rather befitting a royal gift!