jeri - artsy

it's too bad i feel the need to cover up addresses. this looks like marbling and it looks like linda was using other elements to fill in the spaces and that white square is really distracting. so, i guess our design lesson for the day is to take a class or workshop in marbling and bring some envelopes and then just have fun with them.....
some envelopes are experimental. you don't know where they are going....
wandering aimlessly, probably something that we don't do very often, but we would probably be re-charged if we did. i think that's what i like about the blog. it's pretty aimless, but, i enjoy the things that pop up along the way. and for the people who check in daily or frequently....you never know what to expect.  or do you?

June from Patty and Lynne - Books to consider

Once again, I found unopened mail from the previous month. If I had not opened it, I think that means I have not posted it. Apologies if these are repeats. I'm pretty sure they are not because I do not recall talking about marbling. The topic has come up a couple times LINK to previously mentioned marbling I have marbled. It's lots of fun. 

While I have not yet read any of these books - two of them are recommended by our pen pal Clover.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek 

and The Book Woman’s Daughter.

Another book that I have on reserve from my library is 

MAILMAN: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home, by Stephen Starring Grant

Here are a couple excerpts from the review in the NYTimes:

Grant found himself grudgingly delivering the mail in middle age (he was 50) because he’d lost his job as a marketing consultant. He had a wife, two teenage daughters and a tiny but worrisome nugget of prostate cancer. He needed the job for health insurance and to ward off the biggest dog, depression. Several years earlier, he’d moved his family from Brooklyn back to his hometown, Blacksburg, Va., in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so that his children would grow up with grass under their feet. Until he was laid off, he still commuted regularly to New York and other major cities.

<snip>

He liked the days when orders of baby chicks came in, though delivering the heavy bags of chicken feed that followed was a bummer. People gave him cookies; he often got free coffee at Starbucks. He got a lot of steps in, often 15,000 a day.

<snip>

The United States has the largest postal system on the planet, and it accepts no taxpayer dollars. It pays for itself. Mail carriers may grouse and weep and have dark senses of humor, but they have a camaraderie that resembles that of line cooks. They are proud of their work and have genuine integrity, he writes.

<snip>

Grant is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he does not say, in “Mailman,” if he ever took a stab at being a full-time writer.

<snip>

Has he read Charles Bukowski’s “Post Office” or J. Robert Lennon’s “Mailman,” those wildcat novels, or Eudora Welty’s story “Why I Live at the P.O.”? Does he know that Charles Mingus delivered the mail, and that John Prine wrote some of his best songs while doing so? Has he ever listened to “Please Mr. Postman” or “Return to Sender”? Has he seen “Il Postino”? Is he aware that William Faulkner quit the post office because he didn’t want to be at “the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp”? 

OK - that's about half the review -- enough.

 

4th of July from Janet and Jolene

This envelope is pretty dreamy. Janet made two comments. One on a note inside that said she had "gotten a little carried away with the marbling." And then on the flap she wrote, "Sorry for the visual overload."

I dunno. It looks like the 4th of July to me.....it is a rare day that I can say that I like an envelope with flag stamps....and I really like this one.

I do not have any idea how she did this one. She has grandkids. Maybe it's the shaving cream technique. Maybe she'll send us an email with directions. Maybe it is a trade secret.

*****

Now it is June 9th - and I am adding one more 4th of July idea to this post. It arrived in May from Jolene. She used washi tape and the lettering is Akim. If you Google *akim* you can find exemplars. There is also an envelope from this blog that pops up that includes Akim in the blurb - but I need to modify the blurb because I was clearly off my rocker the day I wrote it.

Cleaver way to put the stamp on a flagpole and props to the PO for the nice placement of the cancel. Not that they can choose where a machine cancels - so it's props to the PO for not sending it through multiple times.

From Holly Z - a little late

Check out the cute note that HollyZ tucked in this envelope. Holly has dreamy pointed brush lettering and the marbling is very cool. It's another one of those envelopes that has details that don't really show up in the photograph.