Mail Art Workshop at Artisphere this Thursday!

Check out the fancy flyer that Artisphere made for the series of upcycled art classes that Beth Baldwin has organized! I'll be hosting a workshop this Thursday to share my love of mail art. Can you come?

Details:
What: A mail art workshop led by me! I'll have examples of upcycled stationery and be glad to answer questions about what will successfully make it through mail sorting machines and how to make envelopes from reclaimed papers.  I'll also provide tons of fun ephemera to use in your project.

Where: Artisphere, 1101 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22209.  It is two blocks from the Rosslyn Metro and its urban location has plenty of bicycle parking. There is also free parking with validation.

When: Thursday, May 9, from 6-8pm. There will also be a cash bar from 5:30 to 8:30pm in case you want to get liquored up before crafting, you lush.

Cost: $12, which includes all crafting materials, (or $11 if you're a student, member of the military, or a senior citizen).  Buy tickets online, or pay cash at the door. If you have your own materials you want to bring, feel free!

I hope to see you there!

a personal project

If you follow me on Twitter (which you should, because I post on there faaar more often than here), you probably already know that I'm getting married this fall. We had been having issues with our venue, though, so we needed to wait a while to send out any official notices for the wedding. Plus, I had about 382 ideas for what to do for a save the date mailing, and I needed to work out which was actually realistic-yet-pretty and in keeping with the handmade feel of the wedding we want to have.

Why hello, vintage postcards.

I contemplated typing up the information on my Electra cursive machine, and then also contemplated myself going mad from frustration, so that fantasy only lasted about twelve minutes. However, stamping could still give a vintage look in keeping with the gorgeous fronts without sacrificing my sanity. I had spotted this DIY stamp kit at Staples before for about $30 and looked up some other projects people had used it for. The font was in keeping with our aesthetic sensibilities, so we picked one up. I bought the vintage DC postcards in several eBay lots, sorted through them for the blank ones, and stacked them like so. Aren't they gorgeous? I almost didn't want to send them out.

I would've been perfectly happy framing these instead.

A close-up of amazingness.

And of course, being a huge postal nerd, I didn't want to use boring stamps. I've been amassing a small cache of DC-related stamps for about a year now in preparation for this moment. They didn't lend themselves to easily fitting onto pretty vintage cards, which caused some frustration, but they're SO nice.

It was worth it.

Where possible, the stamps match the fronts of the postcards. There are White House stamps on postcards of the White House, Jefferson stamps on postcards of the Jefferson Memorial, Smithsonian stamps on postcards of the Smithsonian. You get the idea. (See also: Melissa enjoys making things more difficult for herself.)

There are also some library stamps mixed in, but there's a reason for that (besides them going with the Library of Congress postcards).

And after only 125 handwritten addresses and 250+ vintage stamps licked, here is the finished project. The date itself wasn't stamped with the kit, but with a library date stamper I have.

Why yes, I AM the type of girl who has a library due date stamp. Thank you for noticing!

Did you know that if you are a regular at your post office and ask super nicely, the lady you talk to every time you buy stamps will graciously hand-cancel your vintage postcards to preserve the look you spend hours of work creating? True story.

Can I be six again?

Photo courtesy of and taken by Leanne at See the Woods and the Trees.

Following the Craftzine Twitter feed has never disappointed me, and paid off once again with this genius idea from See the Woods and the Trees, linked to this morning. Leanne helped her daughter make a four room dollhouse using reclaimed catalog pages and some cardboard. The result is so cute that it makes me want to have a toddler of my own just to have a socially-acceptable excuse to play with it.

I think it could be made even more eco-friendly by using old cereal boxes or somesuch reused material as the walls. Want a second story? Place another layer of cardboard on top of the first floor, then make another level. (This gives you the chance to paste a floor down, too.)

Best of all, since the dollhouse folds up, it doesn't have to take up a lot of room when it's put away. You could have dozens of setups ready for mixing and matching, and only use a few inches of bookshelf space to store it all.

Promos? Maybe some readers can help me.

I have an entire bookshelf full of papery goodness in the form of stock photography books. These are glossy, thick, pretty books that are given to advertising firms by photography companies to entice the agencies to buy the rights to their images. This means they are perfect for collage, ATCs, and all sorts of other forms of papercrafting. A friend of mine who works for an ad agency found out his office would be throwing an entire roomful of these fabulous books in the trash, and let me and Meigh of NoPantsMcGee in after hours to cart as many away as we could carry. She had a hand-me-down SUV at the time, and we loaded that thing's cargo area and backseat FULL of these heavy books.

Unfortunately, they are not going to all fit in my new apartment. I'm moving from a large three-level Victorian rowhouse with five bedrooms, five people, and seven built-in bookshelves (three of which I took over) to a one-bedroom English basement (zero built-ins). This means I need to come up with a way to get most of them out of my house before moving to the new place.

This is where you come in.

Since they're so pretty and useful for upcycled crafting, I don't want to just recycle them -- I want them to go toward MAKING. And since I want them to go toward making, and I also make things, I want to launch some sort of viral marketing campaign about {craftgasm}, with a free book for participants, perhaps. But the cost of mailing out books individually to people would be too cost-prohibitive to manage. (Is it acceptable to ask for $3 to ship a free item to someone?)

What genius ideas have I not come up with yet? Shoot 'em to me in the comments. (Best idea gets a book!)

Furoshiki! and other eco-friendly gift wrapping

It's Christmas Eve-Eve and if you're like me, you are about to start wrapping your presents for your entire family before you leave tomorrow night for a six hour drive with your mother and tiny old dog leaving you no time once you're in New York to wrap them before Christmas morning. (OK, you may not be doing it exactly like that, but it's close.) I haven't got a ton of extra fabric that I need to part with, so furoshiki! (the exclamation is necessary) is not going to be my method of choice for last minute wrapping, but it is hella-cool. I imagine you could use some fabric presents as the gift wrap for others, too -- is anyone on your list getting placemats or towels?


Furoshiki Gift Wrapping - Funny videos are here

A pretty basket or box could be the gift wrap, too; everyone needs more storage solutions, and these can be found pretty cheaply new, or better yet, for dirt cheap at a thrift store.

If you are just looking for alternative paper, a newspaper with some ribbon makes quite a pretty picture (and if you don't believe me, I've seen similar at Anthropologie, and they know set-decorating like nobody's business). I'd recommend the classified ads, as all text with minimal disruption reads more like a neutral than headlines covering your presents. And colorful ads from magazines are good for small presents (tape multiple pages together for larger items).

This year, I'm using site plans from my office's recycling bins. I got ambitious last week and colored the fronts of buildings in the site plans with green garlands with red ribbons across the windows, but the black on white looks nice too. Last year, bus timetables taped together worked for me. (WMATA prints them in alternating hues of green, so it fit right in with my extended family's more traditional wrapping paper.) And don't forget just plain reuse of regular wrapping paper. We would use minimal tape and thriftily flatten the paper each year when I was younger to rewrap presents the next year, and it was not a big deal.

Hat tip to 365daysoftrash for the furoshiki! video. Quite a neat and thought-provoking blog he's got there.

The Moment You've All Been Waiting For

I'm sure that folks have been constantly refreshing their browsers, anxiously awaiting the official blog-unveiling of my newest product line. No longer! The time has come!

After amassing a huge collection of stationery as "The Queen of Correspondence" (according to my friends), I started making my own when I couldn't find exactly what I wanted already being made. Enter the Recycled Stationery Sets. They are made entirely from reclaimed, reused, and repurposed papers. Notebooks, old ledgers, and abandoned printer papers are some of the sources of the sheets, and the envelopes are a combination of old maps and reclaimed stationery from an out-of-business company. (Their return address was on the back flap of the envelope, but it is now covered by a plain white label [also reclaimed from the trash heap] that is stamped to coordinate with the rest of the set.) Each set comes with six sheets of paper (two each in three designs), three envelopes (one map, two plain), and assorted stickers and labels made from maps. I'm thrilled with how well they've turned out!
You can see more details about them at my Etsy page, but feel free to ask any questions in the comments section!
How do you keep in touch with faraway friends? And how do you reuse any paper you find yourself swimming in?