Letters stuffed with treasures from Pattie

Around the end of the summer of 2014 I became penpals with Pattie through instagram. Creating a penpal through instagram was a new fleet for me, and it really hit me on how big the snail mail community became. Pattie is, I believe, my first penpal from Poland so that was very exciting!

Pattie's vast collection of ephemera and stickers is something to awe at. So whenever I have received mail from her there has consistently been a thick bundle of old post cards, stickers, and illustrations. It is simply amazing.

The latest mail that I received from her was my favorite thus far.

The envelope was beautiful and was made from an old map along with a cut out of an illustration of a bird.Inside were multiple envelopes and packets all brimming with treasures to unfold.

The cute brown paper packet held a letter from Pattie inside. The letter was tied up with twine and the whole thing was dainty and a bit magical. I love the things Pattie talked about in this letter. We've been talking about traveling and how we like where we live. It was interesting that she mentioned about the different attitudes that she feels when she goes to different parts of Poland. 

A letter from Pattie (featuring Snowball in the background)

 Among the many components of the parcel Pattie sent, was a simple small envelope with a bright orange sticker. I'm not sure why, but I really loved the simplicity of this envelope.

 Inside the envelope was a barrage of stickers, illustration cut outs, stick on tags! There was also a little black paperclip with a smiley face on it holding all of the stickers together. 

It was hard to find room to place all of the things that Pattie included and take a photo of it. I feel really thankful that she sent so many goodies my way.

Are there any things that have brought smiles to your daily lives? I'd love to hear from you guys!

The Season of Giving

Winters always kind of suck for me. Things get really hectic, things start feeling really sluggish, and things get hella cold. But what seems to cheer me up through the long winter nights is the opportunity to give gifts to others. For some reason, it just really makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside when I can share little gifts with my friends. It makes me happy sending cute things via the postal system. And I like hearing back from my friends and seeing that they enjoyed the little gifts. And that, in and of itself, can lift my spirits back up.

The first gift I sent was out to my good friend Emma. Throughout this year, I have gotten to know much more about Emma through snail mailing. Her letters, always brimming with empathy, coaxes out that sweet spot of letter writing that I feel kinda proud of.  

I sent Emma some daisies that I picked and pressed over the summer and a little surprise gift.

The next gift that I sent was to Arielle. Arielle is someone I met through a tea themed swap at The Postal Society. What she sent to me was absolutely amazing and so creative that I had to send something back to her immediately. Unfortunately, our parcels and letters had bad timing and while we've both sent many letters and parcels throughout the last months, we have yet to get to know each other very well. But hopefully this time it'll work out! 

When I was putting together Arielle's parcel I was super excited and really liked how the daisies turned out. (I guess that's probably why I didn't notice that I spelled Arielle's name wrong until it was long after I sent out her parcel and I was editing these photos. >___> if you're reading this Arielle IM SO SORRY I GOOFED UP T ___ T).

Anyway, I had a lot of fun decorating the little baggie of tea for Arielle and wrapping up a little extra gift for her.

Another gift that I sent out was for my friend Lizzie. Lizzie and I had a slight inside joke about goats since two years ago. When I saw that there were these caramels made from goat's milk I knew I had to send them over to her. 

Here's what they looked like wrapped up.

I also included a couple pressed flowers for Lizzie as well. Since they were so delicate I didn't want to just throw it inside with the card, so I placed them inside a little tea bag.

Anyway, those were some of the gifts that I sent out around the holidays.

Art Journaling pt. 2!

A while ago, I posted some photos and information about an art journal that I swapped over the past year with Sayuri. It was absolutely a blast for me to fill some of the pages and share with Sayuri my thoughts and I am so grateful that she happily joined in the fun!

A couple weeks ago, I sent over another small journal to her. The idea of journal swapping was just so crazy fun and a great way to get to know someone.

This time I included a smaller journal with little leaflets and ephemera that I thought was cool and wanted to share with Sayuri. 

Like last time, I filled in a couple of the pages with my thoughts and doodles!

This page was one of my favorite to put together. I made the smaller brown envelope and stamped it myself! Then I put together a little fabric pocket to place the envelope in. Inside the envelope were some goodies like stickers and trinkets!

All put together, it was a fat journal filled with pages of paper, shindigs, and ephemera. I can't wait to see how this journal develops over the new year! 

Do you guys have any thing to look forward to for 2015?

2014: The Year of Catch Ups

I've been playing catch-up for a while. This whole year, most posts on this blog has been belated and delayed. Nevertheless, I will keep on posting (due to my own stubbornness of yearning for nostalgia).

Sometime around September/October I received a little box from one of my good friends, Alexa who lives in Canada. I've known Alexa through tumblr where we would occasionally comment on each other's personal posts and so on. But over the summer, I got to get closer to her though...guess what?

Haha, League of Legends (damn that video game and how it ruins/improves my life). Alexa is a really cool, 언니 and she wanted to send me a little something for the painted pin that I sent her earlier during the summer.

We would always joke about how great Canada is so when I saw the mug I giggled and appreciated it even more.

In the letter that Alexa included, there were tons of adorable stickers. I really liked that she had hangul stickers :) (the sticker part essentially says "hey stella")

Alexa studied Korean in uni so it was nice to have a penpal that wrote in a language other than English! (Although my own korean is very very terrible and shabby compared to Alexa's haha).

Along with Alexa's letter I received the smallest mail that I've ever gotten. It was a small card from Arielle, a penpal that I met through a swap in The Postal Society. It was absolutely adorable and made me really happy when I realized that this tiny letter was for me (there even was a little tea bag inside).

The next letter was from my good pen pal, Carrie. Carrie writes some of the best letters that I receive. And I loved the simple way she wrote my address on the envelope.

I also wrote a couple letters of my own. One of my letters was written before Halloween and I drew a little tutorial for one of my friends, Emma, for making "bloody nails"

I also wrote a lot of other letters but I forgot to take photos of them T __ T. I will try harder next time.

Anyway, as always, thanks for reading

petit paquet

A little while ago, I posted about how I sent some mail to Laura for her postal project. And lo' and behold! Laura responded back and oh my god, the things that she sent are absolutely magical!

This wonderful little parcel was sitting in my mailbox and I was so happy to see the multitude of stamps that covered it! In the letter that Laura included, she said that the little piece of mail that I sent her covered with stamps inspired her to decorate her outgoing mail with assorted stamps too! Oh my that made me so so so happy. On the back, there was a little disclaimer to open the parcel very carefully, so I  was very curious to what I might find inside.

What I totally did not expect was this wonderful assortment of her art! The paper that made up the parcel was actually a poster of her art titled "The Sand-Dig." SO COOL!

She also included this amazing zine titled "Summed Staples"

Inside the zine were recipes that sounded so comforting and delicious and beautiful illustrations of the creators of the recipes and things that capture the essence of summer for her.

Some of the pictures had titles of songs to go along with them.

Those songs would be found on the mix cd that Laura also included! Everything was so beautiful and the folky relaxing tunes in the CD reminded me of  hot summer evenings. 

Along with the "Summer Staples" zine was this beautiful accordion style zine titled "Canada Day Parade"

I wanted to share the magical feeling of opening the zine, so I hope that short video did it some justice! Haha. Anyway, everything that Laura sent was amazing and is probably one of the most thoughtful mail I've received up to date. Her response to my silly letter written at 3 am made me think a lot about the topics we discussed. Although this post is a little late, and I've replied back to Laura a couple weeks ago, I hope we can continue to exchange mail in the future!

The poster she sent hangs proudly on my recently constructed wall o' cool stuff! 

 

you can probably spot out some of the things that are on the wall that I blogged about haha.

Also, one of my friends had a chance to meet Natasha Allegri, the creator of the comic/animated short series Bee & Puppycat, and had her sign a limited edition copy of the first issue for me! AHHH! It proudly hangs on my wall o' cool stuff. 

That's it for this blog post. There's so much more mail that I should post about soon but since school started and a good chunk of my time has been taken. I also have been working too, which takes up most of my other free time too (; 3 ;) but I will try my best to post more soon.

"Let's forget it, shall we?"

One Saturday evening after I came back home, I reached into my mailbox to find a parcel from the ever so lovely, Miranda. The surge of excitement and happiness that ran through me prompted me to immediately make a beeline to my room to open up the parcel. I couldn't wait to unravel the bundle of things that Miranda sent to discover the small treasures that she packaged for me. And boy, did she not disappoint.

Inside, the parcel was a little package wrapped in dainty pink tissue paper.

I love tissue paper wrapped things because the soft crinkling of the paper and the semi-sheer opacity of the paper gives off such a magical vibe to whatever is wrapped inside.

Underneath the tissue paper, was another layer of wrapping paper with an adorable pattern of houses.

Inside there were various ephemera. Of those was this wrapped little package. Miranda is so amazing at putting things together in a way that excites the soul. The old paper that was tinged green, the dainty lace wrapping around the package, and the quote; all beautiful. At first, I wasn't sure what would be hiding inside; soap? an eraser? a candle?

What was actually inside, was a beautiful wooden square that had baby's breath captured in resin. Absolutely gorgeous. These were also the other ephemera included, some old stamps, a vintage photo, a vintage playing card.

Also included, was a little booklet. The outside of the booklet was made from a page of an old book. There was a highlighted line on the outside which said, "Pain did curious things to him. It made him sensitive to the pain of others." I don't know how Miranda does it, but she finds the best quotes. 

Anyway, as you can see on the inside there was a feather and a little diagram of different birds. 

On the other side was a vellum pouch filled with dainty things.

 There was also a vintage transparency slide of a conifer.

As always, Miranda puts together the most breathtaking parcels. I'll have to scrounge around to put together something that can be close to how great her parcels are. But that has been the incoming mail these days.

School is about to start in a week, so I'm excited to have some semblance of an organized schedule (though I'll miss the days when I could play league for five hours straight and not have any consequences for it haha). But this beautiful parcel was a nice ode to the end of summer. Thank you Miranda! I will send you something soon!

Journal swapping with Sayuri

I always really loved journaling. I can't remember a time where I didn't doodle all over my notebooks and draw little comics. But I think the first "real" journal that I made was in the seventh grade. I remember picking out a plain spiral notebook with a blank kraft paper cover. I titled the journal "tête-à-tête" and included a page "about me" and such. It was very unorganized and messy and I think at one point I was just taping in anything that I found on the ground into the pages (gum wrappers, receipts, lunch passes, sodoku pages, free coloring books from family video,etc). The journal became so fat and accurately portrayed middle school me, unorganized, crazy about pop punk bands, and a bit weird. Despite all of that, I still pick up my old journal and flip through the pages fondly reminiscing on the past. I guess that's what I love about journaling. It's a great medium to showcase the positive side of my obsessive hoarding (haha).

Anyway, about a year ago, I made a journal out of an old cereal box and sent it to Sayuri, whom I was following on Tumblr. Sayuri posted some amazing doodles and sketches so I asked her if she would like to share a journal with me. She agreed and what manifested was one of my favorite snail mail projects thus far. We would each fill out a couple pages of the journal and mail it back and forth to each other. It was very interesting to get to know someone this way!

A couple days ago, Sayuri sent me back the journal with the final pages filled with magical doodles and thoughts.

The page on the left was the last one I filled when it was my turn to fill up the journal. The page on the right is the one Sayuri filled. It is a sketch of me!!! So cool! I never have had someone draw me so I was really excited to see such a lovely drawing of me done by Sayuri.

A lovely quote that Sayuri wrote on a polaroid. The page on the right was done by me when I was feeling a bit down one day.

There was a page where I drew little circles. I originally planned to make a bunch of badges and stick them to the circles but only got around to making one or two badges. Sayuri stepped in and included some rad stickers and an awesome jake keychain that now is hanging proudly on one of my cubbys on my desk where I admire it daily. 

I actually squealed out of excitement when I saw that AWESOME lisa frank sticker of a UFO and that AMAZING Sailor Moon sticker and instantly added them to my laptop sticker collection.

 

I chuckled a lot when I saw this little comment because I could relate to how Sayuri felt about Animal Crossing.

this was one of my favorite doodles. Haha old man in a hot spring.

It was really interesting because I included a little doodle page with my thoughts too and Sayuri reciprocated by doing the same style on a later page :) 

Sayuri included little doodles titled "daydream #(number)" with little thoughts that she wanted to do and I thought that was really beautiful.

When I first sent out the shabby handmade journal a year ago, I never dreamed that it would be filled with such beautiful thoughts and doodles and nick knacks! Thank you Sayuri for going along with a crazy idea from a stranger on Tumblr. I can't wait to do more journal swappings soon.