How to use this Page

Resource website for illustrators and my clients.

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

After Struggling with D.I.Y. postcards, they came to the rescue

Who sells the best paper for D.I.Y. postcards?

I have gone through many different papers, spending lots of money, and now have stacks that I probably will never use, just to find what's right for postcards.

I've been determined to save by making my own, but to purchase cardstock strong enough just isn't possible without spending loads of money.

I gave in and just started to make them with the best quality matte paper I could find. Unfortunately customers found this paper still too flimsy. So I moved on to the idea of having them professionally made.

Who can provide the best price for the best product?

I went to overnightprints.com, zazzle.com, vistaprint.com, and yet I couldn't find a deal that allowed me to continue charging the price I had in my shop. When I broke down the numbers, it was still too expensive...and I wasn't going to charge $7 for one postcard. You crazy?!

I almost came to just settle with the fact I would have to undercharge and pay extra to offer postcards.

Who came to my rescue? 

Bindery 1. Enough said. They're a local printer here in Des Moines, ran by the lovely Renatta and her family. Name sound familiar? She also runs Lotus Moments Event Center where I just recently had my Artist Reception.

Most large binderies and printing companies probably wouldn't bother with a small business artist who needs a handful of postcards. What a waste of time and money! They're accustomed to thousands to be printed off for one client.

Bindery 1's passion to serve everyone, large and small, makes them unique. I had a couple hundred postcards printed for the artist reception and was impressed with the price AND the quality! Not to mention the turnaround time.

After many questions and her patience, I plunged and ordered 500 postcards. HUGE order......for little 'ol me.

I can now offer professional grade, strong, vivid, and affordable postcards to my customers while staying local! Who knew a business would be so willing? The new postcards will be offered soon. :)

The Bottom Line:  
Don't be afraid to approach your local binderies and printers and get a quote from them. There might be someone out there who is willing to do the small run to support you, and in turn it will support them! And if you can't find anyone, contact Renatta at Bindery 1!

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below, he looks at the new recommendation that women only undergo routine mammograms after the age of 50. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Last week, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed group of 16 outside experts recommended that women should undergo routine mammograms only after the age of 50 and not 40, against the advice of the American Cancer Society and consistent with the recommendations of the American College of Physicians.

Medicine is not a precise science, so the task force could be right but it could also be wrong. Researchers and scientists make probabilistic claims from the data to offer recommendations, in this case, to the Department of Health and Human Services.

To prevent one additional breast cancer death, 1,000 women would have to get mammograms starting at age 40 rather than 50. But doing this would allegedly result in roughly 500 of the 1,000 women getting false positive results at least once, and 33 of them getting unnecessary biopsies, according to Jeanne Mandelblatt of Georgetown University.

According to researchers on the side of the Task Force, the adage that prevention is better than cure loses its intuitive force when one scrutinizes the risks associated with preventive care such as radiation or hormone therapy on abnormalities that may never have become cancerous tumors as well as the anxiety they provoke.

Now, other experts looking at the same data disagree on its interpretation. “We respect the task force, but we do not agree with their conclusions,” says Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “We are concerned the same evidence we think supports beginning at age 40 is being interpreted by others as not supporting mammography.”

Scientists looking at the evidence can disagree, but when they do, they point to the data in order to support their conclusions. Most politicians, on the other hand, do not look at the data and they can in good faith either accept or reject the experts’ recommendations since the experts do disagree. Only a few, however, grab one set of these recommendations, and then leap a few light years ahead, with uncanny certitude, to a conclusion solar systems away from the data on which the recommendations were originally offered.

“This is how rationing begins. This is the little toe in the edge of the water,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician.”

This is when you put a politician between the people and responsible government. They will offer answers, explanations, and analogies with more certititude than the scientists who perused the data, and if their golden tongues wagged with enough vigor, people will believe them because it is easier to acquire information via gossip than it is to collect it ourselves.

Our indifference to doing our civic homework would not be a problem but for the fact that demagogues are able to synthesize our indifference with their certainty to create political slogans but not political solutions. Resolution and confidence are virtues only when the answers are always obvious and unambiguous. But in the world of statistics in which researchers on both sides of the mammogram debate inhabit, and in the world of politics where the meaning of public opinion and the general will fluctuates, unsubstantiated certitude is the one cancer on democacy we should be screening for, every day.

Those of you who have been following the saga of The Bees over at the birdchick blog (http://www.birdchick.com/labels/beekeeping.html) will know that of the two hives we started out with, which we called Olga and Kitty, Olga has thrived, while Kitty did so well that she swarmed in late summer and took off to see the world. We got a new queen, but the remaining bees in Kitty never got her population back up in time for winter.

Which meant that when it got really cold this year, Olga had enough bees to keep the hive warm and Kitty simply didn't. I went out in January and noticed that the snow had melted around Olga, she was removing her dead and, on warm days, bees were nipping out and pooping yellow in the snow, whereas Kitty was just a green box with nothing going on.

So I did what anyone would do. I sent a few thousand dead bees to Lisa Snellings, to make into art.

A couple of days ago I noticed that someone -- probably a raccoon -- had tried to get in to Kitty, and clean out the honey, which meant it was time to do something. I called Sharon, who was down with hellflu, and got the greenlight from her.

Lorraine and I moved the empty kitty hive into the garage.

And then I had to decide what to do with the honey in Kitty. I went onto the Internet to find out if there was anything I could do that didn't involve buying centrifugal honey extractors, and learned that if it was honey I wanted, a bucket and some cheesecloth would do just fine...



So I mashed up the leftover comb and honey into a bucket, tipped the resulting scary-looking gloop into the cheesecloth at the top of another bucket...



Then nipped out to the garage every three or four hours to add more gloop as the honey trickled through the cheescloth into the bottom bucket.



And this morning Lorraine came over and we took the cheesecloth off bucket #1 and poured the honey into jars. Astonishingly, the cheesecloth had done its job, and we had wax and crud on the outside of the bucket and clear honey on the inside.



There's probably the same amount again still in the garage right now trickling through the cheesecloth into buckets.

The honey is wonderful. It tastes like wildflowers and spring. I'd rather have Kitty out there filled with bees (although the Kitty hive that swarmed is undoubtedly fine, in a hollow tree somewhere), but the honey's good too.

...

The Graveyard Book is pretty much ready to be copy-edited now. I was scared that my editors in the UK and the US would point out somewhere I'd messed up that would need a whole new chapter (much as Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury did when she read Coraline in manuscript and said, "It needs a chapter where she confronts the Other Father, who in what you've given me just goes offstage and stays off," and I said "oh Bugger it does, doesn't it?" and had to go and write it. I mean, I knew about the scene in the cellar. I just thought I could get away with not having written it.).

But nothing like that happened. Sarah's biggest concern was a scene where a fifteen-year old girl accepts a ride from a stranger (obviously, she shouldn't have, but Sarah wanted it to be convincing that she did) and Elise only had small points -- the biggest change was that she wanted a sentence removed that spelled out how ghouls got their names, which I'd put in slightly under protest because a few people had been confused as to whether the small, leathery corpse-eaters were the real Duke of Westminster, 35th President of the United States, Bishop of Bath and Wells, or not, and I was happy to see it go away again.

I got an email today from Diana Wynne Jones saying "It is FABULOUS, WONDERFUL, TRIFFIC. One of your best! I love it," which is better than gold and rubies (and if Diana doesn't like something, she tells me). Jon Levin at CAA, my long-suffering movie agent, is starting to fend off the phone calls as people call him wanting to see it, and we have to decide who we're showing it to, which is a good problem to have.

Everything's sort of accelerated right now. The book comes out in six months (30 Sept in the US, a month later in the UK), and there's not really much time for the normal routes of book promotion.

I'll see if we can get a countdown to publication date timer for the front page of the website. I don't think I've had one of those since American Gods.