New Greeting Card: Spoon Dragon $_WINTERHOLIDAY Card

Are you worried about picking an appropriate English spelling for חנוכה? Want to make a point in the "Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays" culture wars? Then we've got the card for you.

How It Came to Be:

As 2016 wrapped up, Ariela knew that November of 2017 would involve a significant amount of work at her day job. So we looked for some products we could release that would involve minimal effort on her part. Greeting cards tend to be the sort of things that can give Ariela a break from her day job, without taking a lot of time to finish and post-produce. Terri proposed the idea of an Global Winter Holiday Season card, using the "$_" variable. Ariela thought that Spoon Dragon was a great character to feature on the card, with winter gear. 

While looking for image references for Spoon Dragon's scarf, Ariela accidentally stumbled into one of the more intense intersections of the Fandom and Knitters Venn Diagram. While years of friendship with Terri made her peripherally aware of the fact that fandom knitters are a dedicated bunch of detail-oriented people obsessed with accurate reproduction, she still wasn't prepared for what she found there. Debates about patterns and yarn choice were expected, but essays on the relative ease of matching paint vs fabric to Pantone swatches and the differences between studio lighting, photoshoot lighting, and daylight were a tad overwhelming for a casual visitor to this subfandom.

The card shows Spoon Dragon holding a snowball, with large fuzzy blue earmuffs and a Very Long Striped Scarf. The outside text reads: "Happy $_WINTERHOLIDAY!!" The inside is available either with no text or with the following: "May your season be joyous and not eat your spoons."

As with all our cards, it is available singly for $4 each or in packs. In addition to our usual pack of 6 cards for $20, this one is also available in a pack of 10 cards for $30. 

New Greeting Card: Pardon My Depression

Normally this is the space for pithy copy and quips. This card, while inspired by what may have been a joke, is entirely serious. Sometimes you need to tell your friends why you've been hiding from the world. We hope that this card may help you.

How It Came To Be:

Normally every time Twitter "updates" their app, it adds a feature no one wanted or needed. Every now and again, however, those "features" can combine to produce something useful. In this case, Twitter's "helpful" new feature actually did its job and resulted in Terri seeing the following:

Not yet, but we at @GeekCalligraphy might have to think about it.

— T Ash (@crewgrrl) July 31, 2017

Tweet reads: "is there a greeting card for "sorry i isolated myself for a month, i was having a depressive episode, and it'll definitely happen again"". Apparently a number of people whom Terri follows had liked this tweet. She replied "Not yet, but we at @GeekCalligraphy might have to think about it." Since Ariela also thought it was a good idea, we went forward. 

The card shows Spoon Dragon hiding under a blanket, all of their spoons lying on the floor. Some of them are bent or broken. The outside text reads: "Sorry about my absence of late. I've been having an overwhelming depressive episode. And it's likely to happen again." The inside is available either with no text or with the following: "It's no reflection on you. I've missed you and value your friendship so much. Thank you for bearing with me."

As with all our cards, it is available singly for $4 or in packs. Unlike many of our other cards, we are selling this card in packs of 6 cards for $20 and 10 cards for $30. 

We hope that this card helps you take care of yourself and keep lines of communication open when you find that the world is too overwhelming.

New Greeting Card: Covertly Hostile Thank You Card

Did someone get you a gift that you Do Not Want? Did a relative get you something that you need or want, but comes with burdensome strings attached? Were you on the receiving end of a gesture that comes with Expectations of Reciprocity TM? Then send them this card.

How it Came to Be:

With the release of the Covertly Hostile Mother's Day card, we had multiple requests for a similarly styled Thank You card. Everyone has that one person in their lives that gets them a gift where the obligations imposed by the gift far outweigh any benefits of the gift itself.

The card features three types of flowers. Rhododendrons are poisonous and mean beware, yellow carnations mean "No!"*, and lint flowers. We're pretty sure that lint is a relative of flax, and it means "I feel my obligations." Those are the small blue flowers. As with the Mother's Day card, the recipient doesn't need to know any of this. All they need to see is a pretty bouquet of flowers. In addition, there is no master flower dictionary. This provides plausible deniability. 

Like all of our cards, the Covertly Hostile Thank You is available singly for $4.00 and as a pack of 6 for $20.00.

*That is literally how it appears in our favorite flower dictionary. 

New Greeting Card: Parents' Day Card

by Terri

Did Hallmark neglect to create a card for your non-binary identified parent? Are you forever searching for a less saccharine card to acknowledge those who may have acted as a parent to you though not precisely family? Spoon Dragon is here to help!

How it came to be:

Both Ariela and I have lamented the sameness of the Mother's and Father's Day cards currently available. We wanted to have a card that had imagery that spoke to geeky kids and geeky parents alike, knowing that those don't always overlap in the same family. Also, sometimes your geeky adult isn't your biological parent. That doesn't make the mentor or parental role in your life any less, and it's natural to want to give them a card at this time of the year. Families come in all sorts, and we wanted to make a card to acknowledge the wonderful relationships that are parental, even if they are not with a mother or a father.

So we turned once again to Spoon Dragon. This time they are in the company of a griffin who seems to be Spoon Dragon's parent.

We have deliberately created this card without gendered terms, equally applicable to parents of any gender, or to anyone who fills a parental role in your life. The interior text doesn't mention a specific Hallmark Holiday, and really is appropriate to any time of the year that you want to acknowledge a person to whom the card applies.

The card is $4 and comes with a white envelope.

New Greeting Card: Bereavement Card

by Terri

Spoon Dragon comforting its kitsune friend in a time of hardship is here to say the words you can't always come up with.

How It Came To Be:

Many of our cards have genderless chibi figures, so at first the card was going to feature two of them hugging from behind. But Ariela had been toying with the idea of making some of our cards feature other recurring characters, so she decided to use the spoon clutching dragon (herein after referred to as Spoon Dragon) from the Take Care of Yourself card.

Ariela briefly considered drawing Spoon Dragon by itself, crying, before remembering that the point of a bereavement card is to offer comfort, and that image would be really counterproductive. Her sister actually said “Nooooooo! That would be so sad!” So instead, she decided to show the Spoon Dragon comforting a friend. I threw out a few suggestions (including, but not limited to: sea serpent, The Loch Ness Monster and a vampire squash), but Ariela wisely chose a kitsune as the dragon's friend.

The kitsune is a Japanese fox spirit. Kitsune are usually portrayed as having between one and nine tails, with more tails generally corresponding to greater age and power; traditions vary. This kitsune has five tails, one of the more common numbers below nine. Ariela wanted to make it clear this was a magical creature, hence more than one tail, but that it is not quite as wise or all-knowing as a nine-tailed kitsune*.

The interior text was really difficult to compose. We wanted the card to be able to convey a general feeling of sympathy (especially the kind you feel when someone you care about loses someone they care about), without it sounding like a Hallmark platitude. I often find that in situations like this, many people sound a lot less comforting than they think they do. We both wanted to avoid that, while also having a card text that would appeal to a large group of people. We hope that it accomplishes that.

Like all of our cards, the Sympathy Card is available singly for $4.00 and as a pack of 6 for $20.00.

*Also, some traditions say that nine-tailed kitusne turn gold, and Ariela likes red foxes

New Greeting Card: Yarn Fanatic Greeting Card

by Ariela

Let the yarn devotee in your life know that you support their habit. Send them our new greeting card encouraging them to collect more yarn.

Protip: You could even accompany it with a gift of yarn for extra brownie points.

How it Came to Be

As Terri mentioned, my brain sometimes makes odd sideways leaps that result in art projects. This inspiration did not strike in the course of a conveniently recorded IM conversation, so I can't quite recreate the path I took to get to this. Since it involves yarn, I feel quite comfortable positing that Terri was the inspiration/instigator.

I was bound and determined to keep the two figures on the card gender-neutral. As we stated in the Fiber Artist's Oath, anyone can be a fiber arts devotee.

Like all of our greeting cards, the Yarn Addict card is available singly for $4.00 and as a pack of 6 for $20.00.

New Greeting Card: Take Care of Yourself

by Ariela

A spoon-clutching little dragon is now ready to help you tell people you care about to care for themselves!

How it came to be:

A little while ago my friend Caitlín Rosberg remarked,

Sometimes I just horde my spoons in my fists like a treasure-hungry dragon and wave my hands at the screen going "nooooo noooo they're all mine noooo you can't have them."

(Spoon Theory is a method of explaining the expenditure of mental resources. It was coined by Christine Miserandino to explain how living with chronic illness depletes one's mental and emotional resources.)

Because my brain works the way it does, this sounded like perfect fodder for a greeting card admonishing the recipient to take care of themselves. After much doodling, this doleful little critter emerged.

I know dragons in various Asian mythologies don't tend to be portrayed as hoarding creatures. But the English-speaking SFF world is already over-saturated with European mythology and I am not interested in perpetuating that trend. But a soup spoon, a wooden spoon, and a measuring spoon are not much of a hoard. And voila!

Like all of our greeting cards, the Take Care of Yourself card is available singly for $4.00 and as a pack of 6 for $20.00.