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Announcement
We’re baaack!
Welcome! And Ha!ppy St. Swithin’s Day! (Don’t know who St. Swithin is? Keep reading to the bottom of the page!)
Our recent hiatus lasted much longer than we originally anticipated. If you’ve been on Zazzle since March 1st, you will have noticed a new user interface. This facelift was accompanied by a sudden and complete overhaul of the design tool. The changes to the tool and the system glitches that understandably accompanied its introduction significantly impacted our workflow. And we stepped back from designing until the situation stabilized and we had a chance to (re-)learn the ropes and determine best practices.
That’s not to say that we’ve been idle! In the interim, we digitized and cleaned up over a hundred new images of both popular and more obscure Saints, re-evaluated our posting policies, and worked out a promotional plan under the Ambassador Program for our own products and products featuring Saints by our fellow Zazzlers. Details to follow.
Today, we’re introducing the St. Swithin Collection. Instead of being built around a single image, the COLLECTION includes several artworks of St. Swithin, a rather obscure but popular 9th-century. Anglo-Saxon bishop. The COLLECTION includes products both serious and humorous in tone. Unlike upcoming COLLECTIONS, this one is quite large. It contains 36 products. Expect most future COLLECTIONS to still focus on a single Saint but include different images of the featured individual, include items that may vary in tone, and be smaller but always include certain core products like greeting cards and postcards.
While everyone on Zazzle is interested in making sales--and Saints_Aplenty is no exception 😊–we are also interested in sharing the imagery. We have access to literally hundreds of late 19th-early 20th century images of Saints from our own collection and public domain sources, more images than we could digitize, clean up, design around, and post in several lifetimes. By posting smaller but more frequent and numerous COLLECTIONS, we hope to step up exposure. The core items posted for any given Saint will be easily transferred to other items of interest by you the customers yourselves using the “Transfer This Design” function of Zazzle’s Design Tool. Saints receiving attention in Zazzle’s Marketplace will eventually get fuller treatment. We hope in this way to attract patrons underserved by bigger businesses. Should inspiration strike (as it did in the case of St. Swithin), we’ll continue to post some larger COLLECTIONS as well!
If you’re new to this site, keep reading… The section immediately following contains valuable information about Zazzle, about us, and about the layout of this site.
If you’ve been here before (and thanks for sticking with us!), you can skip down to “Introducing the St. Swithin Collection” here or to “Our Latest Collection” scroller here.
Introducing St. Swithin of Winchester
By all accounts, St. Swithin, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine who became Bishop of Winchester (d. 2 July 863), remained a kindly, humble man despite his lofty clerical office. Facts about his life are scarce. The sole recorded miracle that he performed during his lifetime was restoring an old woman’s basketful of eggs maliciously broken by a roughneck. Seldom represented in the Fine Arts, St. Swithin is, nevertheless, a popular saint and titular patron of more than 50 British churches as well as additional churches in Norway, the USA, and Australia.
St. Swithin’s claim to fame arose a century after his death when his body was disinterred from its humble final resting place in Winchester Cathedral’s churchyard cemetery and moved--“translated” in ecclesiastical language--to a ornate shrine indoors. On this occasion, an abnormally severe summer storm ensued and raged for days upon days. The storm was interpreted to mean the Saint was displeased at being disturbed and enshrined contrary to his last wishes. Ever since, according to British folklore,
St. Swithin's Day if thou dost rain,
for forty days it will remain.
St. SwithIn's Day if thou be fair,
for forty days 'twill rain nae mair.
See our Gallery below or visit our new St. Swithin COLLECTION on Zazzle with items both serious and humorous!
GOLFING SAINTS AND GOLFERS
Genial Catholic Christian humor pervades our Golfing Saints & Golfers COLLECTION! Frustrated with your golf game? Invoke St. Andrew the Apostle, patron saint of golfers, and St. Jude Thaddeus, best known as the "patron saint of hopeless causes" who can surely help with those difficult shots! Saints_Aplenty can’t guarantee, of course, that using our products will take strokes off your handicap. But, then again, it couldn’t hurt to have heaven on your side!
Click the red 'Action Button' below to view all our current offerings in our Zazzle Store.
Grilling/Cooking with St. Lawrence
Grilling season is now underway! Gift your favorite Grill Master with one of our tongue-in-cheek "Grilling with St. Lawrence" products. St. Lawrence is patron saint of cooks and--wait for it--comedians. He famously said to his executioners who were roasting him on a gridiron: "Turn me over. I’m done on this side!” We like to think he would approve! Also available as "Cooking with..." items.