The spiedie, born in the late 1920’s this popular sandwich is an exclusive cuisine to the greater Binghamton area. This is precisely why this food fascinates me so. Like the Italian gureo, this sandwich was once exclusively made from lamb, but in most restaurants it is served with a choice of steak, chicken, or lamb.
I wanted to create my Stamp in the New York style format, but for some unfathomable reason I can't find any pictures, nor does it seem to even exist on Google. So Ill describe it to you. It is a very stylized piece that still maintains some characteristics of the actual entity. Seeing as my speidie is stylized to the point you can almost not even recognize it, I think I was pretty successful!
At first I couldn’t decide between the speidie and the Phelps mansion as the main focus of my stamp. I decided on the speidie for two reasons. The first being that Speides are only known to the people in the upstate NY area, this means the speide comes from an eaten only by the people in Upstate NY. This makes it a Novelty food. The second reason is because I couldn’t think of any ideas for the phelps mansion.
I made this design to lead you around the image almost perfectly. Starting at the Largest speidie, the vocal point, I made the speidies behind it get progressively smaller which eventually leads you to the second vocal point which is the cost of the stamp- 42 cents as opposed to the normal 44 cents. I gave both meat and the bread texture that is unique to their own look, but I gave visual texture to one other part in the piece- the words “SPEIDIE FEST 2009”. It has almost the exact same texture as the meat. I gave it texture to unify the piece and if I had left the text without giving it texture, I think it wouldn’t look right. I wanted to used mostly warm colors for two reasons, it’s still cold outside, and it attracts more attention to it to make people want the speidie. I think that because of the color pallet I chose, this stamp would probably sell pretty well.
