Mailings have started and I’m ready to move on. I wanted to move in a different direction. I once said, “Gifting a cactus is one of the most passive aggressive moves one can make.” I love cactuses for how they look and grow but I hate owning them. No mater how careful I am I always end up with a finger full of spines. I’ve decided to make some that are a little less dangerous.     This is what spurred (ha ha!) the idea. I have some textures and abstract drawings that I wanted to do something with and using a cactus as a canvas seemed like an interesting direction to go. I’m going to riff on these for a little bit. The cactus stands about 7″ tall and I printed it on a 14pt Poly paper. It is plastic you might find a restaurant menu printed on. I made a dieline that folds up into this. The first couple were prototypes I made to work out...

  This project was a real pain in the butt. Something went wrong at every point. The only part that went well in any way was the creation of the art. After that, it was all down hill. I had problems with the plastic stock changing size while printing. This is a common problem but in most cases it doesn’t matter but because the coins were so small and somewhat precise, every little variance and shift in registration stands out. Then when I cut them, the coins weren’t big enough for the vacuum bed to keep the coins in place so they would pop out during cutting and get caught in the blade. I had to produce 4 times what I needed just to get decent sets. The box I designed that kicked off the project was too big to mail so I had to resize that which then meant the condition counters were then too big… I don’t even know if people use this type of thing....