Hello there and thank you for stopping by. This little website is dedicated to a few postcards that caught my eye while working with the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection at the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. You will find, as you can see across the top of the screen, what I'm calling a Clock Card, an America Card, and a Christmas Card. 

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Why does this site Exist?

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So what is the point of this site beyond having a few postcards? Well, I told my mother, who has been collecting postcards my entire life, about the postcard collection at the Cummings Center of Psychology and she said that it was cool we were sending out the old postcards. I had to tell her that we were not sending them out, only digitizing them. As time went on, I thought about what she had said and I agreed with her more and more as time went on. It would be cool to be able to send someone a postcard that you found in a digital archive. Mostly, it's not that hard to do this. Just download the pdf and slap that baby on a sheet of paper before taking some scissors to it. Almost everyone has a printer and the ability to use scissors, so what's the big deal? As you will see with these cards, that isn't the easiest thing to do.  The reason this site exists is that I wanted to have a place to store and share these neat cards. I wanted to make them accessible and able to be reproduced. I know that sending any mail is sort of a dying art form, but postcards are just cool. At the very least, a postcard that you get to assemble and mail is cool

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What did I do?

 

It's almost easier to tell you what I didn't do. I thought about the best course of action for some time. I considered 3D scanning the cards and then 3D Printing them, which wasn't going to work. I thought about tracking down the manufacturer and seeing if they could help. That was until I realized that there was no way I'd be able to do that. I was lost for some time and I put this idea on the backburner. That was, however, until I remembered about my partner's Cricut Printer. I knew that their design space could set up the images of the postcards to be cut out by the machine. Boom! It worked like a charm. I know that not everyone has a Cricut Printer, but I've been told that more and more public libraries are adding Cricut Printers to their halls. It would be worth looking on the website of a few local libraries to see. As far as I know, there isn't a website or search feature to locate the nearest one, but if there is, please let me know so I can link it here. Lastly, before I get into the actual process of printing the cards, I wanted to say that I know that my approach to this is probably not the best one, but it was the one I decided on. I figured that using a Cricut was going to be the cheapest and easiest for me (and it was), but that doesn't mean a Cricut would be right for you. Anyway, let's get back to the cards.

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How can I print these cards?

Good question. On each of the pages above, I've attached a pdf with the components of each card. Here ya go:

 

1. Print those pdfs at any printer. The Cricut Printer is not a printer, despite the irony (I used a Ricoh Color Printer because I have one, but any will do. Most public libraries have printing for a nickel a page. You can get color printing at some too, or maybe a Staples or some other office supply store. Here its ten cents per color page. I'm sure cardstock is extra). I used card stock (the Cricut can cut out almost any thickness of paper) and it worked out pretty well.

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2. Make sure you have access to a Cricut Printer somewhere. This probably should go without saying, but you never know.  You'll have to download the Cricut Design Space and all that. Here is a helpful video on doing that. You will also need to create a free account with said design space.

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3. Go to this link and open up the postcard you desire. From that point, you can use this video to help you with the rest (there are also helpful prompts in the design space).