Magical Rainbow Sponge
A dense little sponge loaded with rainbow ink, demonstrated for 37 minutes by Dee Gruenig, billed as the queen of rubber-stamping, on a 2000 Posh Impressions tape. Found Footage Festival pulled it out of an Ohio Goodwill, and her unfiltered delight in a wavy stripe of color became an internet classic.
Dee Gruenig came to the sponge through rubber stamps. A Stanford graduate with a master's in art education, she opened Posh Presents, a rubber-stamp store in Laguna Niguel, California, in 1984, added a second shop in Brea in 1992 and moved the first one to Irvine in 1995. Her own stamp line, Posh Impressions, followed, along with a run of how-to books (Stunning Stamping Techniques in 1995, The Great Rubber Stamp Book in 1996, Decorating Scrapbooks With Rubber Stamps in 1998) and appearances on craft television like Handmade by Design and ABC's Home Show, which is where the "queen of rubber-stamping" billing came from.
The Rainbow Sponge was her invention and her signature: a high-density sponge inked in bands of color, dragged across paper to make rainbow backgrounds, borders and lettering for cards and scrapbook pages. In 2000 Posh Impressions put out Magical Rainbow Sponge, a 37-minute instructional video with Gruenig at a table in front of a wall of striped and swirled sample sheets, and, around the same time, a companion book of the same name with more than twenty step-by-step designs using Posh rainbow inks. Sequels followed, Much More Magical Rainbow Sponge and Magical Metallic Rainbow Sponge, both longer than the original. On tape she is exactly what the title promises: thrilled, every single time, by what the sponge does.
That is why it survived. The Found Footage Festival says it found the tape "at a Goodwill in Ohio and we fell in love with Dee immediately," and went on to collect eleven of her videos, calling her a "crafting goddess." Their upload and supercut, a 2011 Wimp.com post titled "This woman really loves sponges," and uncredited reposts that have passed four million views turned a craft demo into a comfort watch; one essayist on the art of the infomercial remembered Gruenig as "a woman of grandmotherly warmth" whose exuberance "comes across as overly hyper and bright." It gets mixed up, understandably, with Rainbow Art, a children's As Seen On TV kit of no-drip brushes and six watercolors that let kids paint several colors at once without mixing; that is a different product from a different company, and people who remember a kids' infomercial are usually remembering that one. Gruenig died in 2022. The tape, meanwhile, is still making new fans a squiggle at a time.
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