Coffee Shop Googie Sign -Card

Happy Labor Day Weekend! Hope you all had a fun time with your families and friends.

I've been reading this great book from 1982 called "Blue Highway" by William Least Heat Moon. It's about his travels in 1978 when he drove the back roads and "blue highways" in order to search out and see the towns untouched by interstate highways, fast food chains and mini malls. Reading about his visits with eccentric characters in greasy spoon type diners and "4 calendar" cafes reminded me of this card I made a while back.

It is made with all of our googie coffee shop signs, and colored with blender pens, metallic gel pens, and sponged with dye ink.

For those of you unfamiliar with "googie" wikipedia describes it well:

"Googie, also known as populuxe or doo-wop, is a subdivision of futuristic architecture, influenced by car culture and the Space Age and Atomic Age, originating from Southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s. The types of buildings that were most frequently designed in a Googie style were motels, coffee houses and bowling alleys.
Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon. Googie was also characterized by space-age designs that depict motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and the ubiquitous artist's-palette motif. These stylistic conventions reflected American society's emphasis on futuristic designs and fascination with Space Age themes. The style is related to and sometimes synonymous with the Raygun Gothic style as coined by writer William Gibson. As with the art deco style of the 1930s, Googie became undervalued as time passed, and many buildings built in this style have been destroyed."

Sad....

We love "googie" here at Sideshow Stamps. The diners that serve that great homecooked food; the coffee shops where you can sit for hours and talk to complete strangers over a plate of home made pie; the motels that are clean and quaint but you're still a little afraid to touch the quilt on the bed; the offices, car washes, bowling alleys, and other such buildings that just had so much life and motion and character to their structure and design. Not to get into a big architecture rant, but have you seen the monotonous lifeless blocks they build these days? Boring...

On another note: Thank you to everyone who entered our summer card contest! We received some beautiful entries!!! We'll announce and post the winners on the 6th!

AND!!! Our new line of rubber stamps are here!!! A panda, bunny, sparrow, nautical star, ghost, gravestones, airstream type trailer and car, retro rocket and MORE!

Go check them out at www.sideshowstamps.com!!!

Have a great week all...

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/