It's here! The new Cartolina Holiday app is now available at the app store. We've been working hard on this for the last few weeks and are thrilled to be able to offer it to you as of today!

Our Holiday app is all about sending brief but beautifully festive messages using one of our customizable Cartograms. Choose from the selection of holiday designs, customize your message and then you can either email or text it to the lucky recipient. The Cartolina app supports dozens of languages and allows you to send to multiple recipients. I think that the Holiday app will be fabulous for pretty party invitations this season. But that's not all - due to popular demand we have added a 4th line of text for your messages. So now, instead of 3 lines you have 4 lines available to you. And, yes, we will be adding a 4th line to the original Cartolina app in the next couple of weeks when we upgrade the app with a new selection of Cartograms. The Cartolina Holiday app is available for just $1.99. *Click here for more details and a direct link to the app store.* If you are looking for the app at the app store on your phone, search for 'cartolina' and it should pop up!

The Cartolina Holiday app is a great alternative to sending a plain email or text message.

For less than the price of a card, $1.99, the Cartolina Holiday app is available from the Apple iTunes store.

For more information on the app or any other Cartolina products please email me.

Check out or website at www.cartolina.com

You can follow us on Twitter and you can check us out on Facebook!

Cartolina online sales

Just wanted to remind you that if you are looking to buy a few individual Cartolina cards, notebooks, pocket mirrors etc online you can do that at Modern Paper Goods website. They are our exclusive online retailer in the US and we work closely with them to make sure they are always up to date with all the new product. They have wonderful customer service - they'll even hand write a card for you, stick a stamp on it and march it down to the mail box for you! No excuses for missing another birthday!

Giveaway Winners

We have winners - 2 lucky ladies have won our Cartolina giveaway! Thank you so much to everyone who entered. I always read all the fun comments and I really do appreciate every one of them.

The lucky gals are Words and Eggs and Fancylinda. We did the usual - blindfolded a complete stranger and forced him to pick, at random, the winner out of the giant salad bowl. I am definitely looking forward to sending off sets of new Cartolina products to both of you - so email me!

If you didn't win, don't despair, we have one big, whopper of a surprise for you in about a month - so we may just have another giveaway then - can't wait to spill the beans - I am so not good at keeping secrets! So stay tuned!

Another Great Big Cartolina Giveaway!

As is the tradition around here, we have new product so we are having a new product giveaway! The prizes are fabulous - the 2 winners shall receive a full set of all our new goodies - cards, notebooks and pocket mirrors -yay! I love sharing the excitement every few months. So all you have to do is leave a comment at the bottom of the post - tell me who you'd most like to send one of our cards to. It could be your granny or it could be someone from history - anyone. I'll leave the giveaway open until Sunday at 4pm Pacific time. Now if, for some reason, you need to get your hands on some Cartolina loot before next week then you can always get yours right here from Modern Paper Goods - the whole collection at great prices and great service options.

One of the best things about designing and producing a product is that I can share it with friends :-)

And I'll have 2 winners on Monday morning for you :-) If you'd like to enter more than once you just need to blog or Tweet this post! Thanks for entering! Good luck!

Cartolina News!

Well, if you have been following along, you will know that we are off to New York again for the Stationery Show today. It's been a busy busy time here - I am constantly amazed at how fast we have grown in such a short time. I'm excited today to let my friends down-under know that, as of June, all our products are going to be available in beautiful stores across Australia including select David Jones stores. This is something that I have been working on for some time now and I am thrilled that it has finally come together.

The response to our new collection has been overwhelmingly positive and I am so grateful to those of you who wrote to tell me how much they liked the new designs - very heartwarming. So many of the readers here at the Cafe are fabulously talented and creative - it's always a bit daunting to debut a new collection here!!

So I have a little surprise for you today - Jennifer at Modern Paper Goods is offering a great promo to any of our readers who purchase Cartolina products for the next week - 50% off shipping! She has all the new product available including the notebooks and pocket mirrors. All you have to do is enter the promo code SHIP50 when you checkout - offer is available until the 21st. Thanks Jen!

I'll be back here in our neck of the woods on Friday the 21st - hope to do some blogging from New York in the next few days - so stay tuned - and have a great weekend.

Happy New Year everyone.

I'm so glad you stopped by this morning!

2010 is going to be a great new year. How do I know that? Because I've been planning it for weeks now! I'm excited to announce this morning that, as of today, it's a whole new world for us here at the Cartolina studio.

If you've been following along for the last year and a half you'll know that there's seldom a weekend that goes by that we're not working hard in the studio taking care of everything that needs to happen to keep a small publishing company up and running smoothly.

Cartolina is 3 years old now. We started as a small collection of everyday greeting cards - but we came out of the gate really fast - growing to a substantial sized line, with multiple categories, in a very short period of time. It's been a steep learning curve over the last few years and, just like every other small business owner, I've had to wear multiple hats in the studio - everything from designer to accountant to shipper and marketing director! I'm a firm believer in mastering all aspects of your business whether it be changing the ink in the printer or writing code on the website.

At some point in the last few months I realized that Cartolina had grown bigger and faster than I ever would have expected and I had to start planning for 2010 - that meant hiring the right people to take care of all my sales, distribution, marketing and shipping so that I can concentrate on designing. It took a lot of research and negotiating(and a few sleepless nights) but I am very proud to announce today that we are expanding our global reach with wonderful new distribution partners in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. A whole new sales force to take care of our retail buyers and great customer service to back up our product. As of today, all our US orders are will be shipped directly from Oregon - so, no more costly international postage rates from Canada - and of course shipping is way faster now too! We have great new prices and lots of pretty new product - we are excited to be licensing our imagery this year for some fabulous Cartolina Home products - I'll have more info on this soon.

I'm hoping to have a lot more time to design and to blog. I think that Cafe Cartolina has some room for growth and I'm planning on making a few fun little changes around here - now that I have time! So now you know what I have planned for this year - how about you? What do you have planned for 2010? Why don't you leave me a comment below . . . .

To start things off this year we have some exciting trade shows - If you are a retailer and you are planning on attending any of the following shows why don't you stop by our booth and pick up a fun little gift that we have for you? I'll be at the Toronto show and I'd love to say hi!

Here's the spring schedule so far:Top Drawer, Earls Court in London, 17-19 January, Booth H45, CGTA Show in Toronto Jan 31 - Feb 4, Spring Fair, Birmingham, 7 -11 February, Booth W06 Hall 3. Contact me if you need any more info on these shows.

Shameless Self Promotion - Cartolina new releases.

If you have been following me on Twitter for the last couple of months you will have been privy to my own personal design angst - lucky you! From the realization that I needed to design a new Cartolina collection for the fall, to the moment that the truck showed up at the studio on Thursday and unloaded the almost 50,000 cards - it's been the usual rollercoaster of emotions that comes with being a professional artist. When I sit down to design a new collection(which happens about 3 times a year) I surround myself with beautiful vintage imagery and start the creative shuffle which hopefully, after about 3 weeks, will result in almost 50 new designs. Those 50 designs then get whittled down to a dozen and eventually, after hours of tweaking, end up at the printers in Vancouver. The printing process takes about 3 weeks during which time I manage to dig up a new detail to worry about everyday - did I pick the best images, are the colours bright enough, should I have made one more birthday card and one less thank you card? It all boils down to the moment that I open up the first box of finished cards . . . .

These are just a few of the new cards - there are 15 new in total. This print run went very smoothly and I am pleased with the new cards but it's not always a happy ending. . . there was the time when we opened up the boxes of new cards and found that they had all been scored with too much pressure and they fell apart, into 2 pieces, as we lifted them out of the box. There was the time we ordered 10,000 new notebooks and every single one of them had torn corners - and of course the time that 2 skids of new cards were delivered in an uncovered truck in a torrential downpour - that was a very soggy ending to thousands of cards. If you are a retailer and you would like samples of the new cards just email me and I'll pop some in the mail! And if you're a reader who'd like some new releases - stay tuned we'll have a giveaway very soon - maybe on Friday!