Card Bundle - Backyard Birds Greeting Cards
One each of six different designs
Kraft brown bag envelope
Option to add patterned envelope liners
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; recycled kraft brown box.
Choose whether you want to add patterned envelope liners.
My curious stories or discoveries printed on back of every card about:
- European Starling
- American Robin
- Black-Capped Chickadee
- Hairy Woodpecker
- Northern Flicker
- Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
Sticker - Ginger G. Chickadee
Stay curious with this little chickadee sticker. Die cut sticker printed on thick, durable vinyl to protect from scratches, water & sunlight. Roughly 2" x 3".
Available plain or with text Rutland, VT.
Clean surfaces before applying.
Sticker - American Robin
Admire that big orange belly on the American Robin. Die cut sticker printed on thick, durable vinyl to protect from scratches, water & sunlight. Roughly 2" x 3". Clean surfaces before applying.
Card Bundle - Caching Birds
One each of six different designs
Kraft brown bag envelope
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; recycled kraft brown box.
Gathering seeds and twigs between seasons are the chickadee, bluejay, junco, cardinal and crow — with my curious discoveries about each on the back of the cards.
Card Bundle - Cats and Cakes
One each of six different designs
Kraft brown bag envelope
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; recycled kraft brown box.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each card includes curious cake-related discoveries on the back with history of:
- Cupcakes
- Decorated Cakes and Candles
- Layer Cakes
- Frosting
- Wedding Cakes
- Cake Stands
Single Greeting Card - Cupcakes
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each Cats and Cakes card includes curious cake-related historical discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
Cupcakes
from the Cats and Cakes Collection
Most agree that the cupcake is an American invention, though there is a British counterpart (the fairy cake) that’s smaller and without our supersized "wodge" of thick frosting.
A 1796 American cookbook mentions "cake to be baked in small cups" — likely ceramic ramekins or even teacups. Some speculate that "cup" refers to the "1234 cake" recipe which measured ingredients by volume instead of weight (one cup butter, two cups sugar, three cups flour, four eggs). By the next century there were more standard measures, eliminating the discrepancy between my dollop and yours.
Hostess sold its first CupCake in 1919 (sans filling and squiggly piping, which came 30 years later). And the first paper liners were manufactured on artillery shell machines that were unused after the world wars.
My family splits the cake in half horizontally, puts the bottom onto the top, and enjoys a frosting sandwich.
Single Greeting Card - Decorated Cakes and Candles
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each Cats and Cakes card includes curious cake-related historical discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
Decorated Cakes and Candles
from the Cats and Cakes Collection
Did you ever notice that some cakes look like castles, and some castles look like cakes?
From Queen Victoria's 300-pound wedding cake to the Wedding Cake House in Maine, look around for connections between cake decoration and architecture. One French chef published a cookbook whose introduction was “a treatise on the five orders of architecture." Those cakes were for viewing, not eating.
And what about the candles? Ancient rituals come into play here, including glowing, rounded cakes dedicated to a moon goddess. The first recorded candled birthday cake celebrated a Moravian minister in 1746 on his 46th birthday, with "Holes made in the Cake according to the Years of the Person’s Age, every one having a candle stuck into it, and one in the Middle." (They drilled the holes first? That must have been one dense cake!) The extra middle candle might have been the lebenslicht, or light of life, which lobbied for another year of living.
Single Greeting Card - Cake Stands
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each Cats and Cakes card includes curious cake-related historical discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
Cake Stands
from the Cats and Cakes Collection
Pedestal plates, dessert stands, riser plates, salvers... these dishes helped cakes rise above the fray at the 18th and 19th century table. Some early salvers revolved, while others included music boxes for a little extra culinary theater.
Cake plates became especially popular with the affordability of 19th century pressed glass, including the "hobnail glass" that you can see under my cat’s sugary cupcake. The raised knobs resemble the hobnails used on some boot soles.
Stacked cake stands led to a new idea: a ready-made, three-tiered design that you can still nab for a few bucks at TJ Maxx. A 1927 etiquette book suggested that when a hostess’s maid is not on the clock, “one of the tiny tiered stands... prove[s] most convenient and enables her to pass three or four things at once to her guests."
Single Greeting Card - Layer Cakes
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each Cats and Cakes card includes curious cake-related historical discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
Layer Cakes
from the Cats and Cakes Collection
Early layer cakes included "sandwich cakes," which sound to me like a tall stack of pancakes layered with jam. Not a bad option when your 17th century cookbook also lists recipes for "pigeon compote" and "how to make a calf's head the best way."
By the 1850s, a number of circumstances helped gift frosted layer cakes to the everywoman including baking powder (first made from animal bones), cast iron cookstoves, machines for milling flour, the ingenuity to make sugar from beets, and an international economy of slave or indentured labor. Not to mention hand-cranked mixers! One model marketed itself for mixing food and paint (hopefully not at the same time). Up till then, butter was softened by hand — literally: "take two pounds butter and beat it with your hand in a puter dish for an hour over a very few coles just to keep it a little warm."
Fortunately for layer cakes, those mixers allowed for thicker frostings to keep mile-high layers from sliding onto the floor.
Single Greeting Card - Frosting
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each Cats and Cakes card includes curious cake-related historical discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
How did we go from cakes that were barely different from bread to sculpted treats a la The Great British Bake Off? Let’s speculate.... FROSTING.
While most medieval cakes were nude of toppings, some used a glaze that was hardened off or “iced” in the oven ("when your cake is enough, take it out, lay your icing on, then put it in to brown"). The earliest 1650s recipe for frosting uses sugar, rose water, plant gelatin and egg white ground in a mortar and beat “extremely” for an hour. And for a special touch, our medieval baker could scent their frosting with ambergris, a musky excretion that protected sperm whales’ intestines from sharp squid beaks (yowza!).
Buttercream hit the scene in Germany around 1915. Good thing! Newly popular layer cakes needed thicker frostings to keep the layers in place and stacked high.
Single Greeting Card - Eat Your Cake and Have It, Too
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each Cats and Cakes card includes curious cake-related historical discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
The original proverb was "you cannot eat your cake and have it too." I guess that didn’t work so well at celebration time, so we changed it up.
And there's probably no more celebration-y sweet than cake. Early Roman wedding goers crumbled dry fruit and nut cake over the bride's head to wish for fertility. Cakes were the territory of the well-to-do, so families of lesser means crumbled grains and corn kernels over their brides.
Stacking sweets as high-as-can-be is also a thing. At European weddings, folks made a pile of small treats over which the bride and groom tried to kiss. Later chefs poured on the sugar to create the croquembouche. And cakes stacked on architectural pillars became the mainstay of weddings in the aspirational Victorian era.
But this kitty doesn’t need a mile-high sweet to celebrate. She’ll just jump on the table to have her cake and eat it, too.
Single Greeting Card - Northern Flicker on the Ground
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
These six birds dart in and out of the grasses, flowers, and ferns in our yard: chickadee, flicker, woodpecker, robin, hummingbird, and starling. Each card includes my curious discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
Northern Flicker on the Ground
I first spied a flicker bobbing across our lawn early one spring. Turns out the green grass is one of this woodpecker’s favorite places, owing to the ants that make up about half of their diet. I haven’t seen this yet, but flickers lie on the ground so that the ants will crawl onto their feathers — they have an acid that repels lice.
After I had drawn this, I learned the underfeathers on the tail are bright yellow. What a thing for an artist to miss! This is true in the eastern part of North America, but those feathers are rosy red in the west.
Want to see more flickers in your yard? Don’t be so quick about cleaning out your rotten trees. Flickers love them for nesting – and this would be good, since population has decreased by half since the 1960s.
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