Seventy-Nine Blue Line Autograph Project: April 2012

April 28, 2012

NICK FOLIGNO

2008-09 O-Pee-Chee Retro
TTM 4/28/12 (43 days)

April 26, 2012

TOMAS HOLMSTROM

2008-09 O-Pee-Chee Retro
TTM 4/26/12 (192 days)

April 17, 2012

BRENDEN MORROW

2008-09 O-Pee-Chee Retro
Paid Consignment 4/17/12

TOM GILBERT

2008-09 O-Pee-Chee Retro
TTM 4/17/12 (67 days)

April 2, 2012

JASON BLAKE

2008-09 O-Pee-Chee Retro
TTM 4/2/12 (135 days)

About This Blog

My all-time favorite sports card set is the 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee/Topps hockey set. It is most famous for featuring Wayne Gretzky's rookie card. For me, it's just as big for including Bobby Smith's rookie. But beyond that, I always loved the design, with the deep and oh-so-'70s light blue border.

Upper Deck resurrected the design for the "Retro" parallel inserts in its 2008-09 O-Pee-Chee set. When I fell back into the autograph collecting hobby a couple of years after that, I made a point to try collecting as many autographed cards as I could from both the original 1979-80 set and the 2008-09 retro set.

A few years after that, after learning some basic Photoshop skills, I began making custom cards with this design for players who didn't have a card in either of the other sets.