Adding Machine and a Letter to Anna

Occasionally I send letters to my friends in town, even though I see them several times a week. I sent this one to my friend Anna while I was on winter vacation. It's made out of a promotional thingy from Cricket. Even the Cricket ads have beautiful illustrations. I love how Bumble is just hanging out, blending right in.

There's a store in my town called PACA - Preservation and Conservation Association. It's a non-profit that takes old building materials and sells them. They have tons of old doors, metal hinges, drawer pulls, etc. I went for the first time yesterday with my friend Anna (recipient of above letter) because she's helping me to refurbish the entertainment center our tv sits on. We found some cool old brass plates that we're going to use and I also spied this cool thing:

It's not a typewriter. It's some sort of adding machine. All the keys are numbers. Pretty cool looking.

Napkin Mail

When I was at the Chicago workshop with Donovan Beeson I learned something fun and new!
You can decorate your mail with napkins!

Donovan had a few different packets of Halloween napkins and showed us how to use them.  You should peel off the top most layer to use for the mail art.  I believe she used a glue stick to glue them to the envelope, but I was a bit concerned that they would come off, so when I tried it at home I covered them with clear packing tape too.  :)

This one is a bit messy, but I like the end product and sometimes it's fun to be messy and it's therapeutic to just not worry about the wrinkles!

In this one I cut out the image from the napkin. It's still a bit wrinkly but I think it looks a bit cleaner.

I'm excited to do this more! It's fun to get pretty napkins sometimes (to eat with) and one napkin normally has 4 images because of the way that they are folded, so they are real work horses in terms of mail art equipment!

I also liked the Jazz stamp for my Halloween mail since it has a nice orange, black and grey color scheme.

Oh, and in the last envelope, in the lower left hand corner I had tried to draw a bat and it came out looking terrible! So I just slapped on some Charlie Brown stickers. Mail art is always salvageable. :)