Traveling box loot

White Sox Cards' post on what he picked up from the Traveling Card Box of Awesomeness reminded me that I haven't done my post on that yet. And I was the first one to get the box! I am a bad blogger. What is the Traveling Box? It's a little project Bad Wax put together. A group of collectors all donate some good cards that they don't need and/or want. All the cards get put in a box and shipped around the country to various collectors who take out cards they want and replace them with cards of equal value. There was a ton of great stuff in the box but I limited myself to 5 cards and I let my son pick out one for himself. Here's my loot:

This is actually my son's loot. I allowed him to choose one for himself and he went with the Orioles' hat logo card of Jim Palmer. He almost snagged Steve's Frank Thomas/Jeff Bagwell/Carlos Delgado triple relic but opted for the Manu-Patch instead. I was relieved because I wasn't entirely sure what I could replace that one with.

First pickup out of the box was a 1969 Joe Niekro card I needed for my 'set'. I'm not really working on the 1969 Topps set and I probably never will, but I attacked the vintage in this box with great ferocity. If I didn't have it before, I had it now.

Next up is a 1971 Topps card of Barry's pop. 1971 Topps I will most likely end up collecting in full force as soon as my 1972 set is complete through at least series 4. I'm actually pretty close to completing Series 1.

1960 Topps is another of my favorite sets so I had to pick up the Ashburn. Richie Ashburn on the Cubs is a tad odd. Also odd is that I picked up more Cubs cards out of the box than Braves cards. Yes, I even left Braves in the box. I tried to replace relic with relic, vintage with vintage, etc. but this one I couldn't find a good match so I snuck in a nice Cub card as a replacement.

Ah, now we're in serious card territory. All cards were ranked in tiers, $5-10, $10-15, $15-20 and so on. I don't remember the exact tier of this card but it was in the next to highest tier worth of cards in the box. I have an accidentally good collection of Al Kaline cards as my mother brought me back a 9-pocket page full of vintage Kalines from a business trip when I was a kid. I did not have the '59 already, so this was good luck.

Ok now the doozy:

Amidst the vintage a 2012 card appears! So. I love Yogi Berra. He's right up there with Kurt Vonnegut, Bill Hicks and Pinkie Pie as far as personal spiritual gurus go for me. I also like old coins, especially silver ones. I saw this and thought I MUST HAZ. So I did. I had to pony up a fairly serious card to get it but I think I left the box in better shape than I found it.

I also snagged this custom card of a 1976 Topps Dale Murphy card. There were three custom cards in there but they weren't on the main card list for the box. I left two sketch cards in the box in exchange for this one. One silly, one mostly not silly.

We were instructed not to give away what cards were added to the box so the suspense would be greater. I scanned all of 'em anyway and I'm going to cheat a bit by showing off a little teaser of the stuff I put in the box. I hope I'm not kicked out of the rotation! Two cards I put in the box were picked up in this haul so at least the peeps like my stuff.

Sketch Card #14 - 1954 Jumbo

While I feel bad about being two weeks behind on my self-imposed Card Show post schedule, I am more than two months behind in posting my sketch cards. So tonight I'll procrastinate on one by catching up on another. I could have posted one of two cards tonight, because I've been trying to post these things in chronological order but I forgot to note the date I did one of them. I went with this one just because. Here's a jumbo sized pastel sketch of a 1954 Topps Al Kaline rookie card.

This one went to Sewing Machine Guy as part of a blockbuster trade we pulled off. And this one was big. Bigger than Renteria for Jurrjens even. Bigger than the card itself, which is 8 inches by 6 inches, a tad larger than the real '54 Kaline. This is to date the biggest thing I've created to send off to another collector although I'm in the middle of a project that will beat it. So how did this sucker get so big? Like this:

Most of the time when I'm doing a sketch card for someone I'll to a practice sketch first to figure out what the heck I'm doing before I try to do it for reals. So I pulled out the sketch book, started drawing and really liked what I did on the first go. It wasn't exactly perfect. Al is leaning to his right a tad and the Tiger logo (somehow I've managed to draw that thing twice so far) is a little derped. But it looked pretty darn good and was big enough for me to do a little experimenting with my soft pastels. So, even though I had already pulled out my ruler and made a page full of '50s Topps sized blanks to draw the final product upon, I ripped out the page instead and started scratching away with the pastels.

Did I mention pastels are messy as hell? Colored dust EVERYWHERE. My blue jeans became purple from all the red dust from that background. I wasn't finished though, there's more work to be done.

Even though it was now practically a painting, I still wanted to create a sketch card, so the whole shebang got glued to the card stock I was going to use for the standard sized card. While letting it dry it got slightly smudged sooooo:

I touched up the details a bit, spritzed it with some fixer and pulled out the X-Acto knife and did a little trimming. Once completely dry, I put it in an oversized top loader. This way it would be protected and hopefully thwart some of the curling that was going on. Soon after I tackled this, I started messing with acrylics, so I haven't done a whole lot more with pastels, although I have one project in mind.

All righty then. There's the sketch portion of the blockbuster trade. What about the cards? SMG requested some Tigers from the '50s in his original offer so I pulled these out of my binders and sent them his way.

In order: 1950 Bowman Aaron Robinson, 1951  Bowman  Bob Cain, 1952  Bowman  Bob Swift, 1955 Bowman Bill Tuttle, 1956 Topps Duke Maas, 1955 Bowman Dick Stanfel, 1954 Bowman Fred Hatfield, 1954 Topps Ray Boone.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE

1955 Topps Bob Miller, 1958 Topps Tigers Team, 1952 Topps Marlin Stewart and 1957 Topps Billy Hoeft. I scanned all the backs of the cards to record the card numbers so I could add them back to my want lists.

You read that right, I pulled these out of my sets to send to SMG for the stuff he had to offer. Oh yeah, I also sent along cash in the deal. Good Grief! Did I get Edgar Renteria for all this? Rest assured, I got Jurrjens. So what did I end up with in exchange for all this stuff? You'll find out later this weekend...

A couple from the quarter box

I hit the card shop with the quarter box again today, vintage lists in hand. Unfortunately, I bragged too much about how I found a quarter box with early '70s cards in it.

The '70s cards were almost completely wiped out.

Luckily, I had already gotten all the semi-high numbered cards and as many '72s off my wantlist that I could find before the vintage goodness evaporated. I am nothing if not flexible in my card-scrounging skills and I still managed to walk out of the shop with a large pile of swag. There was quite a bit of 2010 short prints, inserts and parallels in the box and I managed to get some quarter goodies. Here are a couple that fit a theme.

Here's a 1954 Topps Yo Momma of Al Kaline. Al's rookie card is the second best card from the '54 set and is pretty iconic in its own right. I've always liked Al and not just because my nerdy sciencey self snickered a bit at his name when I was a kid. One time when my mom was out on a business trip, she came home with a couple of pages of baseball cards for me that she found at an antique shop. Two pages of vintage Al Kaline cards. The '54 wasn't in there but there was a really nice 1960 card of Al that I still cherish. That card is the exact opposite of a card Yo Momma threw out. I found a nice pile of these in the box and nabbed them all. I also found this:

Here's a National Chicle short print of Reid Gorecki. Reid made his debut with the Braves last year and played in 31 games mostly as a defensive replacement and pinch runner. He was released after the season and is now in the Yankees' minor league system. I'm kind of bummed about that now, after appearing in just about every early 2010 set as a Brave, he finally gets a really cool card and is now a Yankee. Them's the breaks.

What a Hall of Fame Tiger and a journeyman rookie have in common, I don't know. The '54 Topps design ties them together at least on a couple of quarter cards.