Back in the year , Jacquie Lawson, an English artist living in the picturesque village of Lurgashall in Southern England, created an animated Christmas card featuring her dog and cats, and her 15th-century cottage, and sent it to a few friends for their amusement.
Those friends sent the ecard to others, and within weeks Jacquie was inundated with requests from all over the world to design more. In February she teamed up with a few friends and family members to create jacquielawson. Over the years the collection has grown to over ecards, each one showing a unique degree of artistry and attention to detail rarely seen in animated cards.
Even the music is composed and arranged specially for each one! We now have a range of birthday cards , Christmas ecards , thank you ecards , and so on, featuring dogs , cats , teddy bears , flowers , and many other subjects.
A modest yearly membership fee gives you access to the entire range of online greeting cards and allows you to send as many greetings as you like. You can even get a further discount by joining for two years!
E-mail address: Password: Forgotten your password? Log me on automatically in future Not a member? Sign up now! Join Us! Newsletter Announcements Keep me informed about new cards and other products. Conversion Permission Implicit Permission. But it is this element that has begun to attract big business - if an e-card is funny enough it will be sent on by the recipient, so providing invaluable free advertising.
And that, in essence, is the real problem with an e-card. What used to be a genuine and touching gesture has become a minor Christmas task - or, worse, just another marketing tool. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. Argos AO. Privacy Policy Feedback.
Click here to email us your tackiest Christmas ecard But this year we appear to have surpassed ourselves. Share or comment on this article:. Most watched News videos Distressing videos reveal conditions inside 'China's isolation camps' Jacob Rees-Mogg: Douglas Ross has always been a lightweight figure Xi'an resident 'beaten' by anti-epidemic workers for flouting rules Racy videos of prostitute who was arrested with England rugby star Two airliners appear to fly just feet from each other near Luton Brawl breaks out in Tesco as fearless pensioner continues shopping Anti-epidemic workers go viral for using human chain to deliver food Don't tear the pants off!
Comments 0 Share what you think. Bing Site Web Enter search term: Search. Kickstart your with the one thing you need this January Fun House twins Melanie and Martina Grant, 50, are STILL cheerleading at private parties years after kids show went off-air New bride Ricki Lake is seen flashing her wedding ring for the first time since tying the knot with lawyer husband Obsessive Craig David fan who stalked singer for five years and believed she was his girlfriend appears in court to challenge order banning her from contacting him Apprentice hopeful Alex Short has been the director of THREE failed recruitment firms before trying to impress on the BBC show Make-up free Jane Seymour, 70, cuts a casual figure in black T-shirt and matching leggings as she runs errands in Malibu Dancing On Ice: Holly Willoughby is back in a plunging gown after sparking backlash for her 'inappropriate' wardrobe How tyranny of political correctness sweeping Tinseltown is crushing creativity, stifling talent - and driving audiences away Novak Djokovic given first round draw for Australian Open despite No 1 seed's wait for final decision on whether he will be DEPORTED Love Island's Rebecca Gormley sizzles in busty black crop top with revealing cut outs as she heads for dinner Rebecca, 23, put on a busty display The internet is in tears after Gino D'Acampo surprises daughter Mia, 8, with a PUPPY in incredible footage that sees youngster burst with joy 'When does this get better?
Film crew have explosive behind-the-scenes access to immigration saga On the Atack! Emily hits back at cruel troll in typically sassy style after being branded a 'fat munter' and 'pig' in vile Instagram message Too Hot To Handle season three trailer: 'Wildest ever' batch of scantily-clad, good-looking singles try and fail to not hook-up for prize money Roddy Ricch cancels Saturday Night Live appearance after COVID exposure We make enough for two or three days at a time, and it's always the same childishly simple recipe: fry up some onions and a diced potato in a little olive oil, add whatever vegetable we fancy, and cover with stock.
Simmer till done, then blitz in the pan with a hand blender. Add a dollop of cream if feeling naughty. Serve and look smug. My favourite vegetable for this treatment is known in the UK as onion squash, in France - where I am writing, and where the supermarkets are full of them at the moment - as potimarron , and in the USA as red kuri squash.
But of course, a traditional pumpkin also makes a fine soup - and the recipe also works with spinach, broccoli, leeks, cauliflower All of which serves as a barely relevant preamble to the announcement of a new version of the Jacquie Lawson English Garden! To celebrate the arrival of the pumpkin season, we've added a brand new pumpkin decorator activity - and we've temporarily changed the bug-squashing game to a squash-squashing game!
No download required: just visit your Garden any time after 24th September to enjoy these autumnal entertainments. And then go and make some soup. There's an entertaining Australian comedy series available on Netflix called The Letdown. It follows the life of Audrey, a new mum navigating the ups and downs of parenthood. The show is the brainchild of Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell, who also plays Audrey, and many scenes in the series are drawn from theirs and their friends' own real life experiences.
So when Alison received a Jacquie Lawson ecard from a friend, she decided that Audrey, too, would receive one in the show. And so it is that our card Birthday Band , has a starring role in the opening scene of the second season, which launches on Netflix later in the year. At the risk of a slight spoiler, I should warn our fans that in the show, it transpires that Audrey strongly disapproves of ecards and that she prefers more traditional forms of correspondence.
Ah well, you can't please everyone. But it's still nice to see one of our ecards on the telly! The JL team met up in the last few days of April to do some research for this year's Advent Calendar. We were lucky to have wonderful Springtime weather to explore the surrounding countryside and the magnificent gardens at Hidcote , and we came away laden with inspiration and in Bev's case books for her library and plants for her garden! Well, here it is! Our latest extravaganza of animation, music, games, puzzles, creative challenges and Easter Eggs see November , below!
To set yourself in the mood for this one I think you have to go back a hundred years or so, when it wasn't possible to jump into a metal tube and be whisked across the Atlantic in a matter of hours; when you couldn't get a supply of local currency just by poking a plastic card into a machine; when a souvenir meant more than a t-shirt purchased from the duty-free shop on your way back; and when travelling to far-flung continents was not without its dangers and truly represented a step into the unknown.
The setting for the Curio Collection is the sitting-room of a seasoned traveller from such an era. It is full of exotic souvenirs, curiosities and memorabilia gathered from all over the world.
Each of them will reveal a different secret. It's not quite the same as taking the Trans-Siberian Express or a steamer up the Nile, but you can always dream. And the Curio Collection is yours for the price of a pint!
One of my lasting childhood memories is of occasional family visits to my paternal grandparents. All forms of noise were discouraged. The adults, meanwhile, drank sherry and discussed politics. Our grandfather was born in South Africa and lived for a large part of his life in the West Indies. When the First World War broke out he returned to England, enlisted in the recently-formed Royal Flying Corps, and spent the war flying sorties around northern France in aeroplanes made of wood and canvas.
After the war he returned to his Caribbean plantation for a further decade or so, before finally retiring to the London house which we used to visit. These memories have been in my mind a lot recently, brought to the surface by a new product which we plan to launch in a few weeks' time.
You will be! Christmas is a time when many of us reach out to elderly friends and relatives who would otherwise be alone over the festive season. But for the rest of the year, it can be only too easy for older people living on their own to feel terribly isolated. The Silver Line is a charity which was created to alleviate loneliness in older people.
It offers a free confidential telephone helpline, as well as telephone and letter-based friendship schemes, and a variety of other support services. We know from our own research that Jacquie Lawson ecards are particularly popular with the overs, so we're delighted to dedicate our second major Christmas card release for to The Silver Line. One of the nice things about ecards is that unlike paper cards, people won't think you're odd if you send more than one! So even if you've already earmarked other cards for your friends and family, please help The Silver Line by sending Silent Night too!
There's a long-standing tradition here in the UK that Christmas cards of the paper variety are published and sold in aid of charities, and to reflect that tradition, we've dedicated a number of our major Christmas ecard releases in recent years to various charities.
Established in Cardiff back in , Tenovus Cancer Care has developed a range of services to support cancer patients and their families. Computer techies seem to have a penchant for coming up with imaginative jargon to describe mundane technical stuff. An error in a program is a "bug". When a little message appears on your Android phone, it's "toast" because it pops up, obviously.
And when a programmer hides a secret feature or message in a program or game, it's an "Easter egg". If you read as we do all the comments on our Facebook page , and all the responses to our regular member surveys, you'd see that Easter eggs are probably the most popular feature of our Advent Calendars and English Garden. Of course, our correspondents don't call them that: they talk about "secret features" or "hidden surprises".
But our programmers call them Easter eggs, and in response to popular demand, they've included more than ever before in this year's Edinburgh Advent Calendar. I'm not going to reveal too much here, because half the fun of Easter eggs is finding them.
But your "Edinburgh home" is a particularly good hunting ground. Click the blue star to go there! The idea for our latest Halloween card came when our artist Tom Evans was visiting friends in Bishopston, the area of the city of Bristol where he grew up. It was like a huge outdoor art gallery.
The project has since expanded dramatically and "Window Wanderland" events are held all over the UK, and are starting to appear in other countries, even as far afield as Canada. You can read the inspiring Window Wanderland story, and maybe even create your own magical trail, by visiting www.
And if you're inspired to organise your own event, don't forget to send us some pictures! Here at jacquielawson. At heart we're traditional artists, not computer technicians! We've also tended to stick to fairly traditional artistic styles, realistically depicting tranquil country scenes, rich floral arrangements and other still life designs.
And dogs, of course! But as artists ourselves, we're fascinated by all forms of art, ancient and modern, and recently we started to think: why not explore some more adventurous schools of art in our ecards? Cubism, maybe, or Futurism or Dadaism or Surrealism We decided to start with just four cards in four contrasting styles, and the successful candidates were: a jazzy mid-century modern design with a jazzy musical track to match , a sumptuously curvy Art Deco concoction, a surreal tea party with anthropomorphic animals and correspondingly weird sound effects , and a gentle watercolour design inspired by traditional Chinese painting, accompanied by the equally tranquil music of Erik Satie - himself a leading light of the Paris avant-garde art scene in the early s.
All these new cards can be seen - and sent - in our new JL Modern collection. We're very excited to find out what our members think - and perhaps more importantly, what reaction you get from the recipients! So once you've seen and sent a few, please consider taking part in our survey.
Back in , when jacquielawson. If someone invented an electronic sausage now, it would probably be called an e-sausage. The hyphen makes it clear that this is not a normal sausage, but a special type of sausage: namely, an electronic one.
As time has passed, the internet has wormed its way into almost every aspect of our lives, and even if e-sausages are not yet available on your butcher's counter, e-cards have certainly become a familiar method of correspondence. As a result, the hyphen in "e-card" has lost its purpose, and the word ecard has entered common usage. But in the modern world, orthography is sometimes determined not by the publishers of dictionaries but by the commercial necessity of optimal search engine rankings.
And bizarrely, at the time of writing, if I type "dog ecard" into Google, the first entry is Blue Mountain the cheek of it! The problem is that most people search for ecards rather than e-cards!
So we've decided to bite the bullet and consign our hyphens to the mists of history. And very soon, some poor soul is going to be given the job of going through the entire jacquielawson. But as Juliet observed long before ecards were invented, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
We were recently discussing the choice of music for a card inspired by traditional printmaking techniques, and someone suggested some lute music by the Renaissance composer John Dowland. Objections that 16th century music made a poor match for the 20th century artistic style of the card were brushed aside: apparently this was exactly the sort of music to which a 20th century artist might listen while working on her printmaking! The next task was to choose a specific piece, and My Lady Hunsdon's Puffe was selected partly because unusually for Dowland, it's cheerful!
Dowland was so well known for his melancholy style that he self-consciously named one of his pieces Semper Dowland, semper dolens Latin: Always Dowland, always lamenting. But what exactly he meant by My Lady Hunsdon's Puffe is something of a mystery.
But Lady Hunsdon pictured below was a prominent figure at the court of Elizabeth I, and a Lady of the Privy Chamber, no less: it's hard to imagine her huffing and puffing as she danced an almain! Like most modern instruments, the modern concert flute is essentially right-handed. But over the years more complex keys and levers were introduced to the classical flute, culminating in with the Boehm system which is still in use today; and to accommodate these changes, at some point someone decided that henceforth, all flutes would poke out to the right of the player.
There is some sense in this discipline: imagine a cramped concert hall, or a marching band, perhaps, with flutes poking out in different directions! And to play the flute well, both hands need to be equally dextrous anyway. Keep an eye on our newsletters for more details. We've played both his delightful Arabesques for piano the second features in a card due for release in a few weeks , three of the four movements of his Petite Suite , and a movement from Estampes.
Music lovers who are keen historians may also have spotted that this year is the centenary of Debussy's death in March at the relatively early age of 55, and may have concluded that we're consciously marking the occasion with our choice of music. But in fact it was just coincidence, at least to begin with. Pagodes and the first Arabesque simply seemed like a perfect match for our Chinese New Year and Valentine releases respectively, and then one idea led to another in the same vein and we kept finding perfect matches.
The centenary just gave us a brilliant excuse for sticking to the theme! The Petite Suite in particular is a delightful collection. So the orchestration you hear on our ecards is our own. A few months ago, on a cold January day, we met for an afternoon at Rodmarton Manor opens a new window , the beautiful Cotswold home of the Biddulph family. The house was built, and all its furniture made, in the early decades of the 20th century, according to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, which valued well-designed, locally-sourced, hand-made products in a reaction against poor quality industrialised manufacturing of the late Victorian period.
During the Second World War, Rodmarton became home to children evacuated from a London school under Operation Pied Piper, the wartime program devised to protect children from aerial bombing of cities.
Quite by coincidence, we discovered just before our visit that amongst the young girls sent there in was one Ann Forsyth, elder sister of our very own Jacquie Lawson. Many thanks to John Biddulph, grandson of the original owners, for welcoming us to the house outside the normal season, and for his very interesting tour. So for a while now we've been wondering how we could recreate the magic of an Advent Calendar in a product for year-round use.
And if you've been following our newsletters, you'll know that we've just released the new Jacquie Lawson English Garden opens a new window with that aim in mind. Part of the fun of an Advent Calendar is the daily reveal of something new, so one question which exercised us for many hours was how to manage the garden's internal calendar.
Should we unlock something new every day, starting from the date you first open the garden? Should we just let you access everything on Day 1? We wanted that element of excitement, with something new appearing each day, but we didn't want to force the user to a rigid timescale. So you can miss several days and when you come back, the calendar will only have advanced by one day.
In that respect it's just like our Advent Calendars, and at least you won't have to listen to Christmas carols while you do it! The Christmas and New Year parties and celebrations are just a memory; cold, damp weather seems to seep in through every keyhole; and Spring still seems a long way off. Maybe you kept your spirits up in January by playing with your Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar, but even that is beginning to pall by now. You look through the window at a bare, grey garden and you dream of the days when you'll be able to get out there, sow lovely flower seeds, nurture the seedlings, and eventually plant them out to form brilliant banks of colour.
But all that is weeks away yet! Or is it? Here at JL we've been working on a new project which will fill your world with sunshine and flowers! Not only that, but it'll also fill that Advent-Calendar-shaped gap in your life.
Keep an eye on our newsletters and home page for the latest news If you were lucky enough to receive a card, you had no way of finding whether you'd hit the jackpot and the sender was indeed the girl or boy whose attention you craved, or whether you actually had a secret admirer of whom you had previously been unaware. And meanwhile, you'd send a card to the object of your love, hoping madly that he or she wouldn't think it was from someone else.
Because, of course, Valentine's Day cards were always unsigned. To put your name on a card was considered frightfully bad form. I don't know if people still send paper Valentine cards in this way, but we do occasionally get requests from members to send anonymous Valentine ecards opens a new window.
Sadly, however, the technicalities of the internet, the risk of abuse, and the need to get our emails through spam filters all conspire to make it almost impossible for an ecard to be sent anonymously. The star of our latest floral arrangement is Ranunculus asiaticus , which belongs to the same family as the common buttercup.
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