Current location:	Anaheim CA
Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	The Squirrels - "Got To Be A Reason"
Entry tags:	ribbons

...And melt into this lake. You'll flow down her river but you'll never give her...
The seventh ribbon-story installment. Here's some art I never used -- I had the ribbons printed with ordinary text, but haven't given away enough of them to warrant a new order with the custom art.


LASFS Member/Death Will Not Release You. These were ribbons that I originally ordered in yellow with black, which is when the ladies working the ribbon-stamping machine in Tuscon started cussing my name.

They don't have a good system for black or white printing; they have six metallic foils (gold, silver, copper, red, green, blue) but they have to monkey around with pigments to try to get white or black, and it really doesn't work well. If you have one of my ribbons from this batch, you may have noticed that the printing isn't very evenly applied, it's not up to the same quality; consider, then, that you've got one of the ones that didn't turn out so badly that they threw them away. In the ribbon-making process, there's a certain amount of setup and lossage. This is usually reflected in the pricing structure with minimum order quantities or set-up fees.

RV Awards has a price structure with a $1 set-up fee for a single line of text, so they're losing money if you order five or ten of something; they figure to make it up in the long run. For example if you're making ribbons for a convention or trade show, you may print up hundreds of "Attendee" ribbon (or "Staff") and just a few for "Chair" and "Exec"; they'll end up throwing away a dozen or so of "Chair" that didn't turn out right, but they're cheerful about it because they've got the long print runs to look forward to making some money on.

Playing around with ribbon orders the way I've been doing for a few years, though, is different. My piddly assorted orders cheesed off Parker Systems; they fired me as a customer. (Actually, they surprised me with an unexplained $50 set-up charge on my next order, and then fired me when I tried to find out what was going on.) The ladies at RV Awards have been very candid about how the business works, and so they have asked me to (1) go to the zinc plate artwork for the longer (2-line) text styles whenever possible, (2) also switch to this when I'm reordering a style or expect that I'll be doing a lot of reorders, and (3) try to not have very many small quantities in my orders. This is why, if you're piggybacking on one of my orders, I steer you towards a 25-ribbon minimum; at the 25 cents rate I estimate, that's only
$6.25, so it's not a great burden. (If you only needed five, you'll have twenty souvenirs after the event. Put them in your scrapbook or give them to a history exhibit.)

Rule (2) is also why I have so many good-looking ribbon styles, which I've been sharing with you here; if a style proves to be popular and I get more, I whomp it up in Paint Shop Pro and send in the art.

So here with "LASFS Member" and "Death Will Not Release You" you can see that I'm prepared if I (a) use up the respective ribbons I have on hand, and (b) order more of them. At this point it doesn't seem likely. I'm not the person representing lasfs at fan tables, and I haven't spoken for Loscon since I chaired it in 2001.

Now, if a LASFS member wanted LASFS ribbons, we could get some made up, and we could make them look like the art here (or not). We wouldn't get yellow/black, though, unless we went through some other company. (Piggyback on the laconiv order going into Hodges, perhaps? You're not going to get me phoning up Parker, I can tell you that...) And as it happens, it seems that the LASFS table at the Worldcon this year won't be doing ribbons, so there's no great rush to look into this.

Typefaces: Clarendon Condensed and American Text.


The two great fannish ghods, Ghu and FooFoo, always in opposition. Ghu (whose avatar on earth was Donald Wollheim) prefers the color black, while the great Foo (or FooFoo)'s sacred color is purple. (FooFoo's avatar on earth is Jack Speer.) Some say that Ghu has been reborn as Ghuugle, the ghod of search engines, but that's another story.

I thought it would be fun to print up some ribbons for these made-up fannish religions, and see where they went. They didn't go very far. I did bring the Foofooist ribbons to Noreascon 4, so that their guest of honor Jack Speer could and them out, though.

I only printed up plain stock roman ribbons; I never used the art you see here.

Typefaces: Clarendon Condensed and Clarendon Bold.


Roscoeism and Herbangelism are more consistently observed. Roscoe is the third fannish deity, a great beaver that comes to us in a flying saucer and whose birthday is the first Monday in September; all fans should celebrate Roscoe's birthday by gathering together on or near Labor Day, every year. Herbangelism is the creation of Elst Weinstein and Mike Glyer, so the two of them are happy to hand out Herbangelist ribbons while they last. Elst holds Herbangelist Wine and Cheese Parties at Loscon and some other conventions.

These "religious" ribbons didn't seem popular enough to warrant reprinting; if I had ordered more, this is probably what they would have looked like.

Typefaces: Clarendon Bold, Clarendon Condensed.