When you think of paper tubes, typically, you think of mailing, shipping, protection tubes, etc. But rarely would you ever think that you would find paper tubes used on the runaway as a part of a dress design!
Art Center Sarasota (formerly known as the Sarasota Art Association) began in 1926 by Marcia Rader, Art Supervisor for the Sarasota County Schools. According to the ACS, “the original mission was not only to promote the visual arts in the Sarasota area but to encourage young people in particular to pursue their interest in the arts.”
Today, the Art Center Sarasota is a flourishing establishment for hundreds of many local artists. The center isn’t just for adults. It also has a rapidly growing youth program for kids ages 6-16, where they are offered camps and classes to explore their creative expressions and skills. With the center continuously growing, there is a need for more space which created events to help offset the cost.
In April 2019, Yazoo became a corporate sponsor of Art Center Sarasota’s Beaux Arts Ball and Iconcept Runway Show. This extravagant and heavily attended show featured selected artists and designers that are challenged each year to use their imagination and creativity to create “fabric” from unconventional materials that are not commonly used with clothing design. Eric Cross, GM of Home Resource, was the genius designer behind the fabulous look of Charmian Noel, wife of Yazoo’s Chairman, Earl Noel, Jr. Cross’ design featured an array of Yazoo’s orange paper tubes, placed strategically onto a white dress for stand-out, visual effects.
All proceeds raised during the event will be used to help enlarge and renovate the current building to accommodate more class space, allowing adult and youth programs to operate simultaneously, add more galleries, and install a gift shop and café.
With the New Year finally here, that means that high school seniors are looking forward to one thing the most – graduation. Every school has their own traditions but New Jersey presents a whole new meaning behind a graduation party as they have a pretty unique tradition that Yazoo was glad our paper tubes and cores became the solution they were looking for.
“Project Graduation” is a long standing Glen Ridge, NJ tradition that the seniors look forward to each year. The event was created as a “send off” party for the seniors and put into place to give the students a fun and safe place to be rather than running the risk of getting in trouble at other parties. The planning takes place in the fall when the students pick the theme and start fundraising, designing, and finding the location for the event. It is organized and managed by parent volunteers who have graduating seniors. The event is held in three separate parts on the same evening after graduation; dinner party, tent party, and then a pool party. The seniors have an allotted amount of time to get from one party to the next and have to check in. Toy Story was the theme for 2017 and Yazoo’s paper tubes and cores were used to make giant “tinker toys” for the design.
Michael Blue, a clothing designer by trade and volunteer, said “Last year was the second Project Graduation that I have designed and executed. It’s 9 months of work for all involved but it is all worth it when we watch the kids walk into the tent party. A lot of tears and some very tired parents. Thanks again for being the go-to place for some very specific materials to design with.”
Letterpress printing… ever hear of it? While today’s generation probably has never heard a word about it, most others have. Letterpress printing was brought to life when it was invented in the mid-15th century by Johannes Gutenberg. This type of printing is a technique of relief printing using a printing press, a process by which many copies are produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into a bed of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type which creates an impression on the paper. Pretty cool, huh?
Fast forward to the 21st century and letterpress is still very much alive. So much so that on September 15, 2017, The .918 Club hosted the 5th annual Lancaster Printers Fair which showcased the letterpress printing. The event attracted over 500 attendees, 20 vendors from six different states along with food trucks lining the street. The giant tube roll competition featured Yazoo Mills’ huge 20” I.D. tubes that were used as “rollers” to transfer the ink from the letters to the paper, creating works of art.
A total of five colleges competed in the giant tube roll competition – Kutztown University, Millersville University, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, West Chester University, and Harrisburg Area Community College. Millersville University took home the grand prize as they were declared the winner. Kids were also able to join in on the fun with smaller tubes to create prints with their names on them.
When asked why the event chose to showcase letterpress, Craig Welsh from GoWelsh said “The non-profit that organizes the fair is ‘The .918 Club.’ It’s dedicated to preserving letterpress printing. ‘.918’ is the measurement in inches of the height of moveable metal/wood type used in letterpress printing.”
Check out The .918 Club for more information on letterpress and their events.
The perfect formula for props? High school + fall play + set design = Yazoo tubes.
Spring Grove High School, a local school in our surrounding community, was in need of some materials for their fall play called Midsummer Jersey. Yazoo donated six tubes and the students involved in the play turned them into trees as a part of the set design.
The play was a take on William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that takes place on the Jersey Shore. Claire Shubert, director of the fall play, chose Midsummer Jersey and later found out that it was written by a York County native, Ken Ludwig. She said “the students wanted a comedy and I wanted something linked to Shakespeare, so the play fit perfectly.”
Shubert also picked the play so students could learn more about Shakespeare and the 1960’s, the era the play is revolved around. The play ran from November 18-20, 2016 and
each performance presented a packed house with laughter bouncing off of the walls.
Have you ever walked into a grocery store and saw the Coke or Pepsi display at the front of the store? Most of the time, they have the price of the soda bottles on top of a
tube. These are called display tubes.
Display tubes are used for a wide variety of projects, creative designs, and applications. These kind of tube uses range from point-of-purchase display poles, sign holders, product display pedestals, picket signs, to stage sets and more. If you walk into a Bath and Body Works store across the U.S. this Christmas season, you will see red and white stripe display tubes holding up signs or being used as props. Those are indeed, high-quality Yazoo Mills paper tubes. When customers need their tubes fast, they depend on Yazoo Mills, especially during the busy, hustle and bustle holiday season.
Yazoo offers a wide variety of custom capabilities fit to each customer’s specifications with no minimum quantities and 48-hour turnaround time, which is the fastest in the industry. Give us a call today at 1-800-242-5216 to get ahead of your competition.
It’s been almost two years and we are getting close to heading back to the great city of Chicago for one of the biggest tradeshows of the year. Labelexpo Americas is the continent’s largest
event held for the label, product decoration, web printing, and converting industry. Offering visitors a range of valuable new feature areas, Labelexpo Americas was first held in 1989 and continues to remain an important industry resource for print professionals, brand owners, label and packing designers, and associated graphic industry supplies. Covering nearly 200,000 square feet, the entire show floor is heavily traveled with traffic by thousands of attendees and over 400 exhibitors.
Labelexpo Americas is held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL from September 13-15, 2016. Yazoo Mills will have on display their in-line printing capabilities and custom paper cores for attendees to view at Hall F, booth #6010. Stop by our booth and see how Yazoo Mills can satisfy all of your paper core needs.
For more information on Labelexpo Americas, please click here
Last year, we partnered up with GRIT (formerly known as Moxie), a local full-service marketing, design, and communications agency, to help us create a new creative mailing campaign series that involved postcards and catalogs. GRIT proposed an idea of taking our core values and bringing them to life within our tubes for the series. GRIT’s team spent countless hours creating, editing, and perfecting the design and photography of the entire project. In the end, all of their hard work paid off and landed them a 2016 International Communicator Award in the Print Advertising: Advertising Campaign category.
GRIT says “The Communicator Awards is the leading international awards program, which recognizes and honors creative excellence for communication professionals. The competition receives over 6,000 entries each year from companies and agencies of all sizes, making it one of the largest awards of its kind. The Communicator Awards honor work that transcends innovation and craft; they are judged and overseen by the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts, a 600+ member organization of top-tier professionals from various disciplines working for acclaimed media, communications, advertising, creative and marketing firms.”
The company goes on to say, “Winning this award is a great achievement and attests to our efforts to go above and beyond for our clients,” said Lissa Scott, creative director. “This project is a great example of team collaboration to develop an innovative campaign that will make an impact and achieve the client set goal.”
GRIT’s team constructed a visually impactful direct mail campaign for Yazoo Mills, one of the nation’s leading privately owned manufacturers of high quality paper tubes and cores. Many imaginative projects were presented, carefully utilizing their key products in creative ways to emphasize their differentiators. The chosen campaign was a hand-cut paper-tube diorama, which involved our team designing each visual concept. After painstakingly cutting and assembling each design, a back-lit image was created to feature on Yazoo Mills’ direct mailing pieces.
This winter proved to be long, snowy, and cold but the good news is that Spring is finally here and the weather is starting to change for the better. Soon enough, flowers will start poking through the ground, giving yards some color and the weather will start warming up, just in time for Spring activities.
Paper tubes can be used to create fun and easy Spring time crafts for all ages. With Easter being less than a week away, kids can decorate paper tubes and make them into bunnies, sheep, or peeps. If you are having a hard time growing flowers in your garden, use paper tubes to create fake flowers that you can keep inside of your house all year round! Are you feeling crafty? Cut pieces of paper tubes and put them together as an inexpensive and creative Spring time wreath to hang on your front door. Is the weather still just a little bit too cold to plant flowers? You can use smaller paper tubes to plant flowers in until the weather gets a little warmer.
The winter months always seem to be the longest ones of the year. The blustery cold temperatures and numerous inches of snow tends to give kids the “winter blues” and can stop them from having a lot of fun. If your kids are stuck in the house with nothing to do, give them some paper tubes to create some fun and easy games to help clear their winter frustration.
Take a few plastic cups and tape them to the edge of an island countertop or to the edge of your dining room table. Each child will have a paper tube and a few ping pong balls. Whoever can blow the most ping pong balls into their cup, wins! Do you have a few small marbles lying around? If so, you can create a paper tube marble run. Tape the paper tubes to a cardboard box and cut a small half circle out of each of the tops so the marble can drop down to the next tube. You can make this as small or as big as you’d like.
Create a ring toss course using paper plates and tubes. The paper tubes can be different sizes to create a level of difficulty and the kids can paint the paper tubes and make each color a certain amount of points. Do your kids love bowling but are stuck inside? Bring the bowling alley to your house by painting and numbering paper tubes and setting them up the bowling pins. A golf ball, tennis ball, or a medium size bouncy ball can be used to knock the tubes down. The game possibilities are always endless when using paper tubes!
Have you ever looked at a product and thought of how you could use it differently than its intended sole purpose? Or maybe took a product and added your own touches to make it creative? An artist from Virginia has taken Yazoo’s tubes and made them into art by painting sceneries onto them.
Rosemary C., a professional artist who makes her living as a printmaker in Virginia, likes to work on building supplies and other non-traditional materials that often turn her prints into sculptures. During one of her many art journeys, she stumbled upon an artist who had a tube in her studio, using it to carry her art supplies in. Rosemary was given the tube and she started painting on it. She says, “I was hooked. I used the tube as a challenge. As it is art in the round, it has to work from every angle, creating a changeable story.”
In 2014, she had an extensive exhibit at the Evergreen Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Part of this was an installation using Yazoo’s custom tubes. The exhibit involved 10 tubes from seven to ten feet, filled with artwork all around the tube.