Once a month one of the tables at the Pelican Coffee House is surrounded by eight ladies who exchanging colorful baseball cards. They call themselves the Bucyrus Artists Trading Cards Club, and guard their membership intensely.
“We’re just a bunch of girlfriends that like to be creative, like to be challenged,” said group founder Maggy Everett. “One of the ideas behind artist trading cards is that you don’t sell them – they are never sold, they’re just traded.”
New theme every meeting, focus on local history, surroundings
Sharon Marcum said at each meeting participants prepare one card design, making one for every member, who can trade them and add them to their albums.
Every meeting has its own theme. For example, the last one was inspired by locomotives. Each of the participants comes up with a card design based on a story that finds a place in their hearts.
Marcum created a card on the local history of locomotives in Crawford County. She said as she often goes to Mansfield, she passes by state Route 13 that features a mural depicting a locomotive. Marcum started Googling that mural and she found that it was built in 1977.
Marcheta Gibson’s card design this month was dedicated to hobos, who used trains as a means of free transportation to find employment. Gibson said the design was inspired by her childhood experience of living in a farmhouse near Crestline where her mother used to give food to the hobos.
“When I did more research, I found out that hobos were actually people out of work, looking for work, they were not vagrants,” Gibson said. “This is what I liked about it – how much I learned.”
Mona Trout said her card design was inspired by her visit to Ernest Warther Museum & Garden in Dover that has a collection of trains handcrafted of wood, ebony and other materials.
Club history and membership
The group that started as a scrapbook gathering originated in 2015 when similar groups online and offline became popular and were featured on YouTube. Everett said she thought it was a good idea for the friends’ get together.
The club does not accept new members, but if someone is willing to start their own club, the participants of the Bucyrus Artists Trading Cards club agree to welcome them to their meetings to pass on their experience.
