Clover Signs Blog

Although primarily a traditional house sign maker, Clover Signs has also expanded into the business market, making pub signs and bed and breakfast signs. In October of 2007, Martine approached us for a hanging sign for her new B & B which she clevery called “Martinn”.  The Martinn, located in southwest France, opened its doors on March 20th 2008 and we are pleased to see our sign gracing its entrance. I can assure you, the inside is much more attractive than the outside, featuring a pool, gourmet food and many great activities.

When selling signs, we mostly get the payment by credit card.  However, when Gina from Gina’s Cakes asked us to make them a sign, we couldn’t resist.  We accepted payment for half the sign, then charged the other half in “cake.”

Gina was thrilled with her part of the deal and the cake was most delicious!  Clover Signs certainly recommends Gina’s Cakes as the source for your celebrations.

Of course, if you are looking for a sign, not a cake, you can get a hanging shop sign from us!

Clover Signs would like to announce that we are no longer making slate house signs. The simple reason is this: Our carved house signs have become so popular that we cannot concentrate on 2 things at once.

Slate and stone is still a great choice for a house sign, so we would like to recommend Rustic Stone. Rustic Stone make all manner of slate house signs and signs on boulders, ideal for setting next to driveways.

However, if you were dead set on getting that beautiful custom painting, and simply had to have it on slate, Your Signs, based on the Isle of Wight is the place to go. From simple house number plates to superb custom painted house plaques, their dedicated team of house sign makers and house sign artists combine traditional arts & crafts  techniques together with contemporary  resin & reflective lettering technologies  to produce elegant, quality, long lasting house signs that will  enhance the look of your home in daytime and also help  make your home address easier to find during hours of darkness.

Everybody knows that one of the most important things in any business (not to mention the rest of life) is networking. We used to call it working together. In any case, my wife and I spent a long weekend last week with signmaking acquaintances at Sannerz Designs near Frankfurt, Germany. They also work in HDU, the synthetic wood we use for our carved signs, but focus on business signage as the Germans haven’t yet caught on to the habit of naming their houses.

Although their business structure is quite different to reflect differences in the nature of the markets, we learned a lot from each other, as well as having a smashing weekend, and not neglecting to invest in a little German quality beer and chocolate.

Some of their work is absolutely breathtaking, like this crest - they made a set for this brewers various outlets.

In the networking line, I recently stumbled upon a forum for HDU signmakers. Hopefully we can share our knowledge in this rapidly growing area of business.

As the Germans say: Sie und Ihr Geschäft sind einmalig

The hardest thing I found about setting up this blog with WordPress was changing the default thumbnail size for images. There are quite a few posts about this on the Internet, but only one of them turned out to be any good.

Here it is: http://blog.japonophile.com/flexible-upload/

Flexible upload lets you specify the thumbnail size as you upload, adds the correct tags if you are using lightbox.js or thickbox.js and offers advanced image placement options.

It worked great, was easy to install and hasn’t caused any problems.

In case you were wondering, we have just switched from Blogger to WordPress, as it is much better. We have it installed on BlueHost’s servers, a US hosting company. Both WordPress and Blue Host are fantastic.

I look forward to more blogging now!

Many people want to know where we buy High Density Urethane (HDU) from. We used to import it from the USA, but that was a bit expensive. After a little research we found an Italian company who makes it. They call it Corafoam - and it’s fantastic!

The company is called DUNA-Corradini and you can see their website here: www.dunagroup.com

You have to buy quite a large quantity to make it worthwhile, so if you want a small piece you can ask Clover Signs - and they might let you have some.