Lemfizz Cube

Vintage confectionary is one of those things which can provoke really pleasurable childhood recollections when glimpsed again as an adult. Lemfizz cubes do the trick for me, 1” squares of pressed sherbet sold for a penny in local shops in the 60s and 70s. I think you were supposed to dissolve them in a glass of water for a fizzy drink, but everyone I know used to suck them like sweets for a foaming sherbet kick. Lemfizz came in a four different flavours, each in a waxed wrapper of an appropriately vivid hue. The memories of buying these, and even where I was in the garden when I ate some of them, remain.
This experience was recalled when I found an unopened Lemfizz Cube (circa 1965!) recently at an antique fair of all places. Who was it who had been able to resist opening and eating this 50 years ago? What sort of dealer thought there would be someone daft enough to want to buy it?

The original product logo (left) was done in a strange sort of sci-fi horror font probably of their own design. I discovered that the makers, Carters, were a large firm of industrial chemists based in Attercliffe, Sheffield; what they were using for ingredients I hate to think (this was long before mandatory lists of carcinogenic enumbers and artificial colours.)
I wanted to do a print to celebrate this tiny fragment of local history and scanned the wrapper. By taking all the mid-tones out of the resulting image, I was left with a solid shape which could be repeated and overlaid with different colours. Initially I tried a set of just the four different flavours but pushing this to a large repeat filling the sheet had the impact I was after. I recreated the text for the different flavours from a few later style wrappers which I already had (they ditched the typeface and went for a more flower power style design with clowns as you can see from the two shown here). The print is available at the Easy online shop.
Now if I can find a box of Cadbury’s Lucky Numbers…