Help Wanted

I stumbled across this post on Facebook a few days ago, and thought I'd pass it along to you here. This woman needs some encouragement. If you can get outside of yourself for just a few minutes and send her a card, I'm sure it'd mean the world to her. You can totally spread the love even when it's not necessarily officially sponsored by More Love Letters. (Which, by the way, is a fantastic organization you can read more about here).

 

DIY Envelopes From Used Children's Books

Thanks to Pinterest, a few weeks ago I discovered how to do make the most vibrant, colorful, awesomely illustrated envelopes; and it was even easier than I ever thought it would be! All you need is a decent, mostly scribble-free children's book full of large and interesting illustrations.

 Lucky for me, almost all of the children's books at Goodwill are just 99 cents. I was surprised that most of them were in like new condition! Plus, the paper had a nice weight and gloss to it unlike the big stacks of printed scrapbook paper I usually use. Like I said earlier, it's important to get books as large as you can find so that there is enough material to make a good sized envelope. With this Disney Princess book (about 11x14) I was able to make envelopes large enough to hold a 5x7 card.

Once you arrive home and are ready to desecrate/upcycle some beloved children's books, the real fun can begin! Step one is to remove the pages from their binding. None of my books were exactly tomes by any means, but even for being pretty thin some of the pages were sewn and others were glued. The glued pages could be gently peeled out, but the sewn pages needed to have a few threads snipped before coming loose. Overall, it was quite easy and I managed not to rip any of the pages.

 The template I used was more or less like this one. I wanted to have large rectangular flaps to include as much of the image as possible on the reverse side of the envelope.Looking at the template, you can tell you'll want to find images that have the focal point slightly above or below the center of the page if you want it to line up with the front panel of the envelope. Since I am lucky enough to have a Cameo, cranking out all of these envelopes took no time at all. However, even before my Cameo days, I discovered the time goes right by if you cut them out while watching an episode or two of LOST. ;)

My cost per envelope was 8 cents each for polar bears and 12 cents each for Disney Princesses, and will vary depending how many good pictures you can pull out of a book.  If you pay full price for a "The Stack" of printed scrapbook paper, you'll come out somewhere around 11 cents per envelope. (But who pays full price?? With my most recent acquisition of scrapbook paper, I'm at about 4 cents per envelope). You can probably do even better than that on the used books if your thrift store does special sale days too. Even though it does cost me roughly double, the envelopes, in my humble opinion, turn out more than doubly awesome than the usual printed paper variety.

Today's Outgoing: February 24, 2015

Simple watercolor envelope going to Ariel. Mermaid pun not intended.

More Love Letters

I recently heard about this organization called More Love Letters, and wanted to pass it along to you letter-writing enthusiasts!

The main goal of More Love Letters is to spread love throughout the world via letters of encouragement and support. One way this is accomplished is by people like us leaving friendly notes of love anywhere around town for strangers to find as a random act of kindness. However, they also have a very targeted approach to making the world a better place. People can nominate friends and loved ones who are going through a hard time and if selected, MLL will post their story, collect letters until a deadline, and send a "bundle" of love/encouragement/support letters written by participants to the nominee in one big fat stack of happy.
I believe they do this on a rotating basis every few weeks or month, and they have recently posted a new list of nominees for requested letters.

Over the holiday weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my BFF, Sara in Indiana. While we were together, we rounded up some supplies, found a comfy (and super awesome, if I may say) place to work, and wrote letters to the current list of bundle recipients.

Comforting words come much more easily to Sara than they do to me, so at first I was a little intimidated that I wouldn't know what to say. Though Sara and I may not have any experience with postpartum depression, anorexia, or whatever their exact situations were; we did discover that we had more in common with the recipients than I originally thought.  It was refreshing to look back at times in my life when I didn't know if things would ever get better and see that somehow they had. Somehow between then and now things changed and improved and so did I. Even without sharing identical experiences I felt like I could connect to each person and (hopefully!) offer something they will find encouraging.

We all know what it's like to have a smile on our faces because we've gotten a surprise letter from a friend. Through this organization you can share that feeling with someone else who is in dire need of a smile. If you can find the time to write even just a little note, you can really make a difference in someone's life, and even the world. Even if you're too busy this month, consider passing this post along to your other pen pal groups or Facebook friends! It will mean so much to someone. Thanks in advance!

 

Today's Outgoing: February 11, 2015

After giving some very specific directions, the intrepid Pusheen gallantly set off into the unknown in search of Nikki's mailbox. Good luck, little guy!

DIY Happy Giraffe Card

I gotta start using a better camera.

I whipped up this cute card a few weeks ago just to use up my last giraffe sticker, but not gonna lie,- I'm pretty impressed with the results!

Today out of the blue I felt like I should drop something in the mail again for my cousin serving a mission in Mexico. I never heard if his birthday card survived the iffy Mexican postal service, but I decided to try again anyway. Maybe it's just a meaningless whim, and maybe it will never get to him, but a little happy mail never hurt anybody.

I'm told that his family has had luck with the pouch system (AKA the ugly mail system. Seriously, you can't even use envelopes!), but I'm not going to give up on regular mail just yet.