All Dressed Up -- But Nowhere To Go

I was all excited. I found out about the Penpal Party and sent an email to sign up for Round 3. Then I started working on a page I intended to include in my letter to the penpal I got matched with.

Finally I got an email with Penpal Party in the title. I was hoping it would include the address and maybe some other info about my new penpal partner. Instead, the email read,

Hello friends!

You wrote to inquire about a round 3 of Penpal Party. Unfortunately the project has been shelved for the time being -- at least in its current form.

I am so disappointed. See, I even had my party hat on. Dang, just my luck.

Bianca's Giveaway

To celebrate her 100th follower, Bianca Jagoe at Goodnight Little Spoon is having a giveaway. She is including some of her awesome handmade envelopes, acrylic stamps, stationery and assorted other goodies. Check it out!

Found Stationery

I often use "found stationery" to write my letters. Letter #21 is one of those. I just finished it, using magazine pages as my stationery du jour. The letter begins on the reverse side of the page shown above. The other side is a mostly white page and those are the ones I use most often. Sometimes I do the opposite and write on dark pages with a white pen.

Find yourself some stationery today and if you don't have anyone else to write to, you could WRITE TO ME! Address at top in the righthand sidebar.

Mail Art Sticker and Stencil Courtesy of Triple A

Saving stickers that come in my junk mail is second nature for me, but sometimes they languish in a keeper pile for months. This sticker from Triple A auto club is one of those. I happened across it yesterday and was determined to use it and started looking at it. I kept staring at it trying to think of an A-A-A acronym to make it work. Then I saw it. I grabbed my Cutter Bee scissors and snipped out the cross bars of the first two A's to make the M A logo you see above. Mail Art! (You could snip the 2nd and 3rd crossbars instead to make A M for Air Mail.)
I peeled the sticker off and stuck it to an envelope. Voila!

As I was gathering up the scraps to throw away, I noticed I had a pretty fair stencil
left from the sticker backing, so I saved it too. Below, you can see the stencil and the logo I made using it. How cool is that!

World Revolutions

When I get new followers to my blog, I always click on their profiles to see if they have blogs of their own. So this World Revolutions card goes to a new follower whose main focus seems to be mail art.
The base for the card is one of those magazine subscription reply cards. The collaged paper bits came from an educational videos catalog. So, this is another of my eco-friendly cards.
I hope she likes it.

Outgoing: Numbers 11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18

Whoa, today's the 17th. And I have Letter Number 18 written. How did that happen? I'm actually ahead. For about 5 whole hours anyway.

These will go out tomorrow. Make that Tuesday. No mail tomorrow for MLK Day.

Do you see your name, your town, or maybe your zip code peeking through?

Outgoing: Numbers 6-7-8-9-10

These went out one day last week. Maybe one of them is heading your way.

My Round Robin #7 Cards Are Home

Show Me The Money
Tee Time
Ballerina
Flip Flop Fun
Sunny Days
Big Top Circus
America the Beautiful
Watermelon
Anything Goes
One of my very favorite Yahoo! groups is Gluebots and one of the fun activities we do there are the round robins. Each participant starts with a 4 x 6-inch background card and glues one image to it. The cards are passed along with each new recipient adding an image until the cards make it back to their owners. Such fun. Above are my cards from the latest round.

That New Year Smell

2010. A brand spanking new year arrives. You can tell it's new because it has that new year smell. You know, the smell of new hopes, new resolutions and new possibilities. That new smell is everywhere...all over TV, in magazines, Bloglandia. Even in your old car.

It's everywhere, I tell ya. Even in my mailbox. After sitting empty the whole first week of Twenty-Ten, some letter love finally wafts its way to Greek Miller Road on the 9th. Isn't that smell intoxicating? Four items in one day. Yay!

Quick. Somebody close the hole in the ozone layer. You're letting the new smell out.

Holiday Address Labels: A Three-Word Tutorial

Cut and paste.

Toy Story 2 Fold & Mail

Foldables are fun and quick to write. Just the thing when one is playing catch-up. And thanks to the aforementioned SNOW DAY, caught up I am.

I finally remembered to scan before I addressed this one. It's a little surprise for someone I know peeks at this blog from time to time.
5 of 365

McDonald's Bag/Envie -- Part Deux

Today is January 5th and already I am lagging behind schedule in my letter writing resolution. But, never fear. Today also happens to be the very first SNOW DAY of the school year.

So that gives me the chance to get caught up. Here is the envelope for Letter #4. It is made from the same McDonald's bag as the one a few posts back.
4 of 365

School of Visual Arts

A School of Visual Arts poster was destined for File 13 at school. Rescuing it gave me four free envelopes including the one you see above.


The address label is also eco-friendly. It is made using a junk mail find for the template.
Victoria's Secret has some lovely things, and though their brochure no doubt sold a lot of underwear, I didn't add anything to their bottom line. However, I was quite happy to use the nifty template/coupon to trace and cut out a few address labels. It's a sturdy little thing and I can see it living in my mail art box for quite some time to come. 3 of 365

McD's is Giving Away Free Envelopes

Guess what? McDonald's is giving away free envelopes. I couldn't believe it. They gave one to me the other day when I drove through and ordered a McChicken sandwich from the Dollar Menu. Woot.

Careful though, if you order fries. Those crazy teenagers think that envies are food bags and are not very cautious about the grease spots.

For those of you counting, yep this is Letter #2 of 2010. And even though I couldn't count it as a letter, it gave me great pleasure to send a belated Merry Christmas card to the ACLU. 2 of 365

Outbox -- First Letter of 2010

One of my unwritten resolutions, and therefore not very resolved?, is to write 365 letters in 2010. I looked in my correspondence notebook from 2009. From the time I started my blog at the end of June until now I have 182 entries. But some of those are postcards, so don't really count. Still, it doesn't seem too daunting. We will see how it goes.

I used my security envelope standby, minimally decorated with a pink highlighter. On the back I circled my favorite DIRECTV channels, not that anybody cares. 1 of 365

On the Importance of Printer Settings

Picture this. Crockett, 2009. The day after Christmas. Mike buys oysters only at this time of year and wants to know how to cook them. I am the last person on the planet you'd want to ask because I don't cook things I don't like. And I don't like oysters or turnips. For much the same reason, they're slimy.

Anyway, back to the post. This is what happens when you attempt to print a recipe called Fried Slimy Oysters (yes, I added the descriptor) and don't check your printer settings. I thought it should have been titled, What a Waste of $60 on a Gallon of Slime that Nobody in his Right Mind is Going to Eat Anyway, but what do I know.

So that it is not a total waste of ink and photo paper, I'm calling this postcard Flotsam & Jetsam #22 and mailing it off to some lucky recipient, who most likely will say that not only is it a total waste of ink and photo paper, but also a waste of a perfectly good 28 cent stamp.