Sal's Ultra Blog

Memory Lane Cards is branching into Tube map birthday and wedding anniversary cards this year. I’ve only been Grazing for 4 years, and don’t have an unlimited supply of snack boxes. So I’ve concentrated on 17th to 24th birthdays (I think it’s a bit sad when your card no longer celebrates your age, apart from 18 and 21), and 16th to 25th wedding anniversaries.

These little cards are just 75p each, or £1.50 with p&p

The idea first came to me when making a card for my in-laws’ 54th anniversary, so do let me know if you’d like to order a card not in my range as I can easily make one (and personalise it with the date of the wedding).

Wedding anniversary cards are £1.50, or £2.25 with p&p

It’s a tad awkward to get a lot of anniversaries into the Graze box format, so I decided to make panels for bottle bags, as these are longer (& double sided)! I considered selling the finished bags, but decided that upcycling was central to my mission, hence the DIY kits. Plus it’s cheaper.

I’m not sure where Bingo Lingo came from, but it has that same nostalgic feel as the Tube map. And the 1 to 90 sequence has some interesting allusions. Some calls are obvious rhymes or references to life events, such as Dancing Queen and Old Age Pension (sadly no longer 65 these days). Others have more obscure origins; Doctor’s orders (9), for instance, refers to Pill Number 9 in the Army, which was for constipation. Wikipedia states that Dirty Gertie is a reference to Gertrude, the nickname for a bronze statue of a naked woman, installed in Finchley in 1927 by Daily Mail and Mirror founder Lord Rothermere.

Most people have old bottle bags kicking around at home; if not, it’s a trip to Morrisons. The finished article looks like this:

And finally, here’s a Wordle card I made of some of my favourite places in Belper:

The Wordle card is 75p. Suggestions welcome for a Wordle card of your town!

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The locations for my ready-made cards (£2 each, plus £1 if postage is needed) are shown on the map. But – from Oban down to Bude – I’m always adding new places as I make more cards!

Please click Order Form if you would like to order a customised card, based on a specific UK location (these are £5, but extra cards the same are £2 each – the main work is capturing the images of the old maps). Or, if you prefer, you can leave the typography and colour scheme to me and just email the post code or street address.

Just a quick preview of some of the reservoir cards. Others in this series are Rudyard Water, Kinder Reservoir (1899) and Fernilee Reservoir in the Goyt Valley (1938). Finished in 1798, Rudyard Water is one of the oldest reservoirs in the country. It was constructed to feed the Caldon Canal, which is a Staffordshire branch of the Trent-Mersey Canal. I couldn’t find any maps from before the reservoir, but it made a nice card anyway as the 1950s map has the working railway, which is now a footpath.

Carsington (constructed 1980s) is our local reservoir and a favourite place to walk, run or cycle.

What a lot of us think of as Ladybower Reservoir in the Peak District is in fact three reservoirs: Howden (1901-12), Derwent (1902-14) and Ladybower (1935-43).

One problem with using my usual GrazeBox mounts for the reservoir maps is that they aren’t quite big enough to explore properly all the now-submerged hamlets on the 1890s maps, so I’ve upscaled on this card I made of Haweswater for my father who lives in the Lake District!

Dam construction began in 1929 and farms and houses were demolished. Bodies in the churchyard had to be exhumed and moved to Shap. The church was dismantled and the stone was used in the dam. There must be so many stories to tell with these reservoirs …

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I’ve been saving the boxes from my Graze snacks for 4 years now, thinking of giving them to the local Scouts or Guides for crafts. But in August 2014, I had a eureka moment, when thinking what birthday card to make for my father-in-law, a retired Geography teacher and author!

I knew of the National Library of Scotland website as a source of old maps as I’d been researching my family tree and trying to locate addresses from nineteenth century census records. So I thought, four maps of the village of Corfe Castle, where my father-in-law now lives, and this was my first card.

Each card takes about an hour to make and shows a 2km² area of map across about 120 years. It’s often fascinating to watch farmland change into suburbs, as happened in this card, made for a friend who grew up in Sheffield!

This card of Dawlish, in Devon, is the first one I’ve done of a coastal town…

Others in the coastal series are Blackpool, Lytham, Fleetwood, Southport and Formby (west coast), as well as Skegness, Whitby, Scarborough, Bridlington and Robin Hood’s Bay (east coast).

…and I’ve made lots centred on parts of Belper that are going to be stocked in the Belper North Mill Museum gift shop, selling at £2.

The cards will be plain, but there’s a small ‘Mappy Birthday!’ and ‘Mappy Christmas!’ tag included in the packaging so you can use them for either occasion!

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