July Stationery Giveaway

The July Stationery Giveaway will be announced this Sunday, August 1, 2010. This is a free monthly drawing featured at the Letters & Journals website.

We offer different prize baskets every month and draw a winner on the first of the month. Once you're signed up for the e-newsletter, you're in! (You don't need to re-register each month.)

Journaling Arts.com (giant journal)
HotShoe Cards (notecards)
Crane & Co (notecards)
Pennant (magazine)
Sakura of America ( 3 pen sets)
Daycraft (small notebook)
Brushdance (illustrated Journal)

Typewriter + Thank You Note = Happy

This

This lovely typewritten note came to me last week as a thank you from Lily Greene.

Lily, whose story is featured at Letters & Journals this month, collects postage stamps. I save most of the stamps from the mail I receive, so I sent her a few of the cute, funny or more obscure ones that I have.

And she was sweet enough to send this adorable and quite original thank you note.

Are you inspired?

Jackie's Originals

As promised, here are the 4 pieces of mail art I made last weekend. I have found I like to keep things fairly symmetrical. I guess that's what works for me. Looking forward to some free time so that I can do some more of these again (one day).

I used clear decoupage finish on a couple of them (the bottom two). I used the finish as a glue and also as a  topcoat.  The top two cards I used a regular glue stick. I recycled heavier weight cards to be used as postcards as the base for all of them.

Urgent 2nd Class

I'm in a mail art kind of mood these days after being inspired by all of the comments on the post over at Good Mail Day. I wrote one article after receiving my first piece of mail and now I have received four more original and very cool pieces of mail art (photos to come in my next blog).

Looking for ideas and inspiration, I turned to Nick Bantock's book, Urgent 2nd Class. The book is about 'creating curious collage, dubious documents and other art form ephemera.' Some of you may be familiar with Bantock through his Griffin and Sabine stories, which were also about mystery and romance of the epistolary form.

As much as I love mail art and the romance of mail art, I am not very talented, but spending time this weekend on it, I found that I wasn't as hopeless as previously thought. I used a combination of newspaper images, old letters/postcards, calendar pages, used stamps, advertisements and favorite quotes. Now I have four postcards ready to send to those generous souls who sent to me, plus I plan to make some more (now that I'm on a roll) and send some to others.

Postcrossing is 5 Years Old!

Congratulations to the people at Postcrossing who are celebrating their 5th anniversary. I joined in August of 2005 shortly after they launched. I'm not sure exactly how I found their site, but have been pleased as punch that I did.

Last October I wrote a short post with one of my favorite postcards (that one was from Russia, this one is from Finland).

I go through phases where I will send lots of cards and then I will take a break for a month or two. At one time I got involved with journal swaps, themed postcards and such by logging onto their forums and searching for more specific items to trade in the mail. But now I have the magazine to keep me busy, so I have not been as active in these extra activities.

In their blog this week, they are promoting a contest where you can email a photo of yourself sending out some postcards. The winner will receive a packet of 60 cards! Well, what are you waiting for? Get your postcards, stamps and camera and get a move on!

Butterfly Envelope

Here is the envelope I sent to The Envelope Project at Meet Me at Mike's. Inside the envelope I included goodies which mostly consisted of paper ephemera from my box of miscellaneous whatnot. It's been great fun looking through their posts and seeing pictures of all of the envelopes and items that have been sent to The Envelope Project. What a cool concept.

This project reminded me of what Jennie from Red Letter Day wrote in her blog about about her latest project: creating art by recycling junk mail for a local area exhibition called "So Many Products So Little Time - The Junk Mail Show" that took place last weekend in in her section of the country, San Francisco. It's inspiring!

The Envelope Project

The Envelope Project is asking people from all over to send an envelope stuffed with something (photos, pages from magazines, ribbon, swap cards, vintage patterns, notes, shopping lists,  little (lightweight!) zines, sweet wrappers, stickers, really) to be displayed in a window at Meet Me at Mike's.

But that's not all! They are taking pictures of each item and posting them on Flickr, saving all of the items and their envelopes and will draw one winner at the end to win EVERYTHING that was sent in. How cool is that?! They are also updating their blog with some of the photos.

The project started on June 14 and continues for six weeks which puts it at July 26, 2010 for the end date. Since this is going to Australia, you may want to get your package in the mail soon. Good Luck! I need to start looking through my stash to see what to send. I will post pictures when I do. I hope you do too (and let me know).

L&J Magazine Update

We launched the Letters & Journals website in May 2010 and had some great responses to the design and layout as well as some of the stories that have been featured. Thanks to those of you who took the time to comment!

We started sending out LetterNews, the L&J newsletter that we had hoped to send bi-weekly, but most likely will be a monthly, at least for a while. There's a lot of great content out there, but it's a matter of having the time to put it all together. The design for LetterNews is still in process, but in the meantime, we're using the L&J logo.

A lot of you have said to get you on the list for the print magazine which is scheduled for 2011 (hopefully early in the year). The best way to do that is to sign up at the Letters & Journals website or for LetterNews. Please spread the word. The faster we can build the list of names, the sooner L&J magazine will go to press!

June Stationery Winner

The winner of the June Stationery Prize Basket was H. Wendt. Congratulations! And thanks for signing up for LetterNews, the newsletter for the Letters & Journals website. We had hoped to publish bi-weekly, but plans have changed to make it a monthly newsletter instead.

The July Stationery Prize Basket is being put together now. If you haven't already signed up for LetterNews and your chance to win, you can do so here.