Pictura Purse Pads

Pictura, Inc. was founded in Sweden in 1969 with a product base of yarn knitting samples. The company branched out to include postcards and other paper products, and came to the US in 1980.

Sometime in the late 1980s Pictura introduced the Purse Pad, a beautifully-designed small, rectangular notepad with a magnetic closure (from their website it looks like the Indigo Moon pattern was the original purse pad, and the pads are still labeled Indigo Moon on the back). These are great notepads, which you may have seen at your local stationery shop as they are beautiful and inexpensive--two necessary enticements for opening the change purse or wallet.

I've got a few of these around, and have given them as gifts. Some may find them a bit too decorative, but that's really their point: somewhat over-the-top beauty. There's a Victorian feel to these, like 1890s collectible cards. The design is excellent with lovely pictures that are wonderfully detailed and colorful. The writing paper is quite good, and the pad has a magnetic closure to keep the paper intact and safe from wear.

The Pictura product line includes notepads and hand mirrors if you really want to accessorize. At the National Stationery Show the Pictura booths (about 5 or 6 total) carried what looked to be like a thousand or so samples of purse pads and accessories. This seashell motif is one of my favorites, but there are so many to choose from that you can spend an hour trying to decide. This is a frilly line of notepads that, I suspect, is meant to appeal to one's inner Barbara Cartland--which is quite a large audience, when you think about it.