The Fleer Sticker Project Turns 1 !

I can't believe its been a year to the day since I started off the blog with a post on the 1960 Fleer Baseball Decals back on December 12 last year:


If you would have told me before I started this venture last year that I'd do 145 posts over the course of a year's time and would have over 37,500 visits to the site over the last 7 months once I figured out how to add a counter, I would never have believed it.

I got the idea for the blog in the fall of last year after discovering the growing number of baseball card blogs including Ben Henry's The Baseball Card Blog, dayf's Cardboard Junkie, and Steve's White Sox Cards. Paul Lukas' UniWatch and Rob's Aquaman Shrine also provided a lot of inspiration.

As I had been spending a lot of time communicating with other collectors on a number of different Fleer sticker sets, the idea started to take shape of putting together an online database of information on these various sets and the variations so that I could share what I had found out about these different sets as well as get feedback from other collectors.

Seeing blogs where people posted pictures of their cards and commented on them gave me the idea of doing the same thing for what I wanted to do with cataloging the Fleer sets.

The results have turned out much better than I could have ever hoped. I've met a number of great people that I never would have come into contact with had it not been for the blog, and the response to the blog in terms of the number of people visiting the site each day amazes me.

I'd like to take a few minutes to look back on some highlights from the 1st year:

January: My first look back at NFL merchandise from vintage Sears and JC Penney's catalogs:




I've gotten a great response to this post as a number of other sites linked to it at the time.

February: The review of the 1969 - 1971 Fleer Quiz Cards.

These sets were one of the reasons I wanted to do the blog as this 3 year series is full of variations that I've never seen documented before.

March & April: Fleer Baseball Cloth Patch Month(s):


This series of Cloth Patches issued over a 7 year period from 1969 to 1975 was the second topic that I really wanted to spend a lot of time trying to cover in depth. Trying to sort out all the variations like this took two months to cover given that I only focused on one team at a time:

I'm pretty sure the blog is the most comprehensive look at this series ever done.

May: Fleer Big Baseball and Big Football Signs:



The most rewarding part of doing these posts was the response I got from Jeff who shared his collection of signs he created for teams that had joined the league after these had been originally issued as well as some custom signs he did that I requested:



July: The blog starts to get noticed!

First, I came across an auction on ebay that lifted my post (word for work) about the 1977 Fleer Baseball Grand Slam Hi-Gloss stickers:


At least he also copied the embedded link in the post to another post of mine so I'll take it as free advertising!

Later in the month, an article on ESPN the Magazine's site linked to my ode to Lowell Palmer as the Coolest Baseball Card of All Time:


If you believe the people who left comments on my post about Lowell, it appears that he was quite the ladies man as a few people left some notes about having dated Lowell during his playing days.

September, October & November: Fleer NFL Football Cloth Patches Month(s):


Just as I had done with the Baseball patches, I undertook a team by team review of all the different Football cloth patch variations in the 1972 to 1976 Fleer NFL Football Cloth Patches like these:



I had a tremendous amount of help from Craig in putting this together as he shared many pictures from his collection.

December: Taking a break from Fleer items for a bit, I covered the various Sunbeam Bread NFL issues from the mid '70s:


I'd like to thank Steve from TheCowboysGuide.com for his help with the Sunbeam Bread cloth patches review.


Looking back, its been a great year for the blog as I've had a lot of fun posting every few days and meeting a number of great people that are bloggers themselves, or collectors who find the site and drop me a note.

Before I took the plunge this time last year, I wasn't sure what to expect and whether or not it would be a worthwhile exercise. I'm happy to report that this has turned out to be a great experience that I hope to continue for at least another year or so.

I've still got a lot of Fleer related items to cover for Baseball and Football, and I'm going to try to cover Basketball items at some point as well.


I'll also continue to cover other items from time to time to mix things up and hopefully keep it interesting.

I'd like to say Thanks! to everyone who follows the blog on a regular basis, and to everyone who has added a link to the site on their blog or linked to a specific post that they enjoyed.

And finally, thanks to everyone who takes the time to leave a comment. Its always gratifying to see comments on something you've posted as it shows that your post was interesting enough to warrant someone spending their time to share their thoughts.

One of the things I've found more and more challenging as the year has gone by is to leave comments on other people's blogs due to the large increase in blogs that I enjoy reading. When I first started the blog, there were about 4 or 5 blogs I would regularly read, but that list has grown considerably as you can see by all the blogs that I now link to and try to follow daily. I'm afraid my ability to leave comments has suffered as a result since I don't have enough time to repsond to every interesting post I read.

Not that I'm complaining as I think its great that a number of people have decided to join in the fun and share their perspectives on the card / sports memorabilia hobby. Its just that an unfortunate consequence is that as more and more good blogs are being written, its harder to spend the same amount of time that I used to spend reading each of my favorite blogs.

Hopefully I'll find myself writing a similar year end review this time next year. In the meantime, Thanks for reading!