Gator paper

This lovely tail-eating alligator is from the Amanda Visell Don't Eat Paper stationery set. I should have taken a photo of the back of the envelope, which says, cutely, don't eat mail. I am particularly fond of this stationery set for its mix of cute and dark/weird. I really like the illustration style, too. (Here's another design in this set.)



Here's a closer look at those gator fangs, which I embellished with Stickles glitter glue. Sparkly pearly whites!

APAK Happy Hermits + glitter

Here's yet another Dark Horse design that I overlooked while browsing the website, but when it came in my mailbox, I kvelled over how adorable it was and wondered how I'd ever missed it. Behold, APAK Happy Hermits! These round creatures are so adorable and loving.



And, BEST OF ALL, they ride unicorns together!!

Here's another view of the paper inside from the sender before it was mailed.

Supersonic Shag

I have blogged about my love of Shag (that's the artist, Josh Agle) before, but not until I searched around on here did I realize how little I've talked about his fabulous stuff. I write letters on his offerings from Dark Horse comics quite a lot, but I guess I don't blog about them nearly enough. (So many letters, so little time...) This set is called Supersonic, and it's peppered with very slinky hipsters doing groovy things. There is kind of a travel theme, but also kind of not - some rocking out to record players and other such things show up in the set. I just adore Shag's artwork and style.

Anyhoo, I wrote the letter featured in this blog entry in response to fabu pink-enveloped letter from the gal behind Goodnight Little Spoon. Her letter to me was so beautiful that I had to liven up even this Shag envelope with a little glitter-glue bling.



As I noted on the back of the envelope, I chose the supersonic flight stamp to match the "supersonic" stationery theme, but it doesn't say supersonic on it anywhere, so that's kind of an inside thing.

From a sheet of vintage stamps, I snagged this "mail early in the day" advice, which is now completely moot with today's sorting methods (I think).

Green lotus-goddess envelope

I sent this in response to the lovely Letter bat + Victor Hugo which I blogged about yesterday. The green lotus envelope above is another from the Sanjay Patel's Hindu Goddesses set, a la Dark Horse Comics stationery. I tried to color-coordinate the stamps to have a green theme... and I hadn't even known that green was this pen pal's favorite color!

Owls for an owl

Once again we have the fabu Red Tango stationery set from the Dark Horse Comics stationery line. I just love this one so much.

On this owlish envelope, I matched some vintage owl stamps, with an American Kestrel thrown in for fowl play.

A Penny Dreadful poem

My creative cousin gave me a doodle and an impromptu poem on the back of her new Penny Dreadful stationery. Tres cute!

Happy Independence Day, my fellow Americans! Enjoy your 4th.

Sanjay Patel's Hindu Goddesses stationery

One of my latest purchases from Dark Horse Comics stationery is Sanjay Patel's Hindu Goddesses.

The envelope shown above is for Kali, goddess of death. You see just the head on the ground because on the stationery paper she is shown holding the severed head... but all in a very cutesy way, I promise. The wonderful recipient of this letter blogged about it with much more detail than I have, and she took more photos, so please do take a look at her wonderful chronicle and her excellent blog in general, Damaged Goods. She is quite an artist.



Here's the back of the envelope, showing Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of knowledge and luck.

When my letters show up on other blogs

The artistic gal behind Damaged goods blogged about my latest letter to her in her Now back to your regularly scheduled post blog post. Fun! As usual her photographs are more interesting than mine, and she photographed every sheet of the Sanjay Patel Goddesses stationery set I used. Take a look!

Shag Calypso + Parker 51

I was starting a letter one evening, and thought of what a lovely photo the page with the pen would make, before I added any words. (I did put the date at the top.) The pen is my beloved Parker 51.

This is the Shag Calypso stationery set from Dark Horse comics.



Here's the full page, complete with curly-tailed black cat.

Evan Harris Birds of a Letter envelope

This is the envelope of the letter I sent in response to the artistic letter featured in yesterday's post. A pretty envelope someone else drew, gussified with some stickles glitter glue, is just about the best I can do to try to offer some merit of visual artistic value.

The stationery is Evan Harris Birds of a Letter from Dark Horse stationery. I didn't take a photo myself of the inner pages, which have FANTASTIC designs plus the added perk of a white writing space (all the better for showing off those pretty fountain pen ink colors, my dear), but I lifted the promo photo from the Dark Horse site just so I should share the pretty goodness:

Red Tango Horse

Here's another lovely from Dark Horse Stationery: the Red Tango set. It's a little girly-looking for me, but I like the sass and the shape of the horse.

I used Stickles glitter glue (silver and purple) to make the front sparkle a little bit. And I couldn't resist drawing a flower on my first letter to Flower Mound, TX.

Kuromi gets Pandora's Box

My Kuromi-sending blog reader got this letter in response, using the Pandora's Box design from Rachel Williams' Miss Anne Thrope stationery a la Dark Horse Stationery.



Dare to open?

Two letters on Dark Horse stationery

This week saw a lot of letter action on Dark Horse stationery. Shown here are Rachel Williams' Miss Anne Thrope (top) and Shag Cats (bottom). I love this fun stuff - very wild and colorful designs, on the envelopes as well as the inside paper.



And now for a totally random side note: this is my 100th post! Yippee!
(Anybody wanna follow my blog to help me celebrate?)
Tee hee.

The day I wrote 9 letters

I do write a lot of letters, but 9 heading out on one day is prolific even for me. This is what I did with my spring break.



These babies all headed out on March 19, so yeah, I'm behind on this happy blog... but I think it's apropo of the timing of snail mail... you just gotta wait for it, and that's part of the joy. Plus, these letters have already arrived by now (I hope!); I hate to ruin the surprise of letting recipients know exactly what their letter is going to look like before it hits their hot little hands.

Green Owl from Red Tango

One of my new favorites from the Dark Horse Comics stationery line is the Red Tango stationery set. Each designed page is a different color theme, all with kind of cute retro-type images. The cat is wonderful, too, but this green owl has to be my favorite. Maybe it's because I'm a child of the 70s, and this reminds me so much of the decorative arts from my childhood.

Fountain pen users who are wondering - it's fairly good FP paper. The coated colors make some inks play more nicely on it than others. With some pens there is bleedthrough, with others, not. My Parker 51 loaded with Waterman Black is always a safe bet on any Dark Horse papers, and that combo never bleeds through or feathers.



This went out to a LEXer (a person from The Letter Exchange, that is) who responded to my listing in the winter issue.

For anyone out there who's reading this and is a LEX member, I'm #12447. Someday (soon, really.... yeah...) I will dedicate a post to just how cool LEX is. (In the meantime, read a bit more about it here.) I'm kind of waiting to see how many more people I actually do get letters from, since I've only got one regular correspondent from that venue - but it seems like a wonderful resource so far. More to come.

Robot Sparkles

This is from the Amanda Visell Don't Eat Paper stationery set from Dark Horse Comics.

The sparkly dots around the edges are my own addition of glitter glue.

I used one of my favorite vintage stamps here too, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Mmmmm.

Kirsten Ulve's Snail Mail

I love this stationery, actually called Kirsten Ulve's Snail Mail. Each page has a different design. Here are 2 of the 8 that I used in a recent letter:



And the back of the envelope:


And one more envelope:


Love this stuff.

First venture with sendsomething.net

I won't say who got it. Gotta keep some privacy goin' on.

This is Rachel Williams' Miss Anne Thrope stationery, with an Edward Gorey bat rubber stamp, and a postage stamp featuring my bitchy tabby cat Magic with a jack-o-lantern.

Amanda Visell Don't Eat Paper stationery

This here's the alligator envelope, with some embellishments from Pilot Petit1 apricot orange ink.

Where I bought my Amanda Visell Don't Eat Paper stationery