Who's excited for Halloween?!?

Halloween is my favorite holiday. If you've been following my blog for long, you'll know I've done many, many posts about Halloween and Halloween mail. Partly this is because I adore bats, but also because I just like the spooky autumnal mood. I can't really explain why I love Halloween so much, I just do.

So it tends to be around Halloween that I'll jump back into Swap-bot for a couple of Halloween-type postcard swaps. I just participated in a Bat-themed Halloween postcard swap, which involved a handmade bat postcard. Can do! I had great fun using my bat washi tapes and stickers.



Of course this was a perfect occasion to use one of my brand-new Batman stamps, just issued last week.

Now that I'm posting the photos, I just realized that I never used any of my great bat rubber stamps on it! Oh well, there is plenty more mail (October and otherwise) for that.

Happy Halloween mailing!

Fabulous mail to kick off 2014

Already 2014 is a fine mail year. I've spent a good chunk of my free time writing, and have received some spectacular mail in return.

Above, a handmade gocco postcard from the fabulous Carroll, whose mail art and artwork always just astounds me. This postcard is going up on my bulletin board right above my writing desk! Have a look at her own photo of this artwork, which she sketched from her ink storage shelf.



Next up, brilliant bat mail from Donovan of the Letter Writers Alliance. Wow, does she ever know me, and is she generous, or what? It's a light wooden bat ornament, which is probably also going to somehow fly from my writing desk bulletin board. It came beautifully and soundly packaged, and I was able to preserve that loveliness with some fancy fingerwork with my special craft knife, which I had to use to open it. I love mail challenges!



Finally, I have acquired a new pen pal. Normally my pen pal roster is closed, but the 3-year-old 4-and-a-half-year-old son of my dear first cousin wrote to me. He actually wrote me FIRST, out of the blue, and I haven't even seen this fine young fellow in more than a year. So of course I wrote back, and he's now written me a couple of times, most speedily - and he always mentions cats (which just wins me over even further). Here is one of his annotated illustrations from his latest missive.

And now... off to write some letters!

The shark-infested mailbox continues

EGADS, I spoke too soon! Or rather, I posted too soon. Earlier today, I posted about the shark mail saga. Check it out. It's fun. Then, in today's mail, I got more shark mail! This fine collage came from Laura of PleaseDeliverTo -- the one who started the whole lovely shark mail affair. She said it's her first handmade postcard -- what fine work, Laura!



"A wine cork, some duct tape, and a ruler" --?? That sounds like quite a shark-capture story! Seriously, though, how perfect is that wonderful Titanic stamp for the shark mail theme?

Now, an unrelated tip. For my newer blog readers (how many months or years has it been since I shared this tip?), did you know you can click on the photos to see a larger version of them? They're all in Flickr and you can embiggen them there.

Happy time handmade postcard

I got assigned a rare Postcrosser who likes handmade postcards, conveniently at a time when I could actually make a postcard - so I broke out some rubber stamps and stickers for US-1248400 to Australia. I got a kick out of making this one. The mangled English stamp reads "Happy Time: flowing of waited interval is itself time." Deep.

Orange printed "Save the Postal Service" postcard

So this is one of those awesome free printable "Save America's Postal Service" postcards that I blogged about a couple of days ago. The savvy designer recommends cream card stock, but I don't have cream card stock. I do have glaring bright orange card stock! So, I printed on that, jazzed it up with some washi tape, and taped it to some paperboard, as my card stock felt a bit flimsy for the mail processing machines. It makes me smile to think of any postal worker than handles this, and notices it.



I made this little doodle of appreciation on the back.

Catwrangler's fabulous stamps

Fellow cat-loving mail enthusiast Catwrangler has the most amazing collection of rubber stamps, and she's not afraid to use them! She is also generous with her mail, sending me lots and lots when I still haven't responded to her, and sending other random goodies. I think I love every single one of the stamps she used on this all-stamp handmade postcard.



And so many of them are meta! I heart meta mail. Yay letter stamps. And look, that's her own kitty on the Zazzle postage stamp, too.

AMAZING writing bat postcard from Carroll!

If you know me at all, you know I absolutely plotzed when I saw this postcard. It came to me in my own Monster postcard swap, and the amazingly talented Carroll. Oh my gravy. A bat, holding a fountain pen and writing a letter to me? Incredible! And what a fine bat it is!

You can't tell from this scan, bit it's like this was a painting painted right on canvas. Carroll worked her magic somehow to make this beautiful yet tough, and it arrived in my mailbox today in absolutely gorgeous, perfect condition.



And here's the back. Of course she used bat postage stamps! She also used a wonderful hand-carved stamp of a skeleton holding an envelope, and I'll wager that is bound to be Carroll's own handiwork. If you've been following my blog for a while, you may have seen some of her hand-carved stamps featured here...



...most touchingly one she carved for me showing my dear cat Memo ("Memo guards the mail") which I received just a few months before he died.

Carroll, you have outdone yourself once again!! What a treat!

Update on Walltype

A couple weeks ago I blogged about a new postcard exchange site I'd just discovered, Walltype. I thought I'd follow up and share my experiences of the past couple weeks with you.

I've sent 11 postcards through Walltype since I joined on June 19, and have received 8. I have every reason to believe I'll get a postcard for the last 3 I've sent, since some are inevitably coming from foreign users whose postcards will take longer to travel.

One factor is that it seems to be a very small group of users who participates regularly, nothing like Sendsomething.net or of course Postcrossing and Swap-bot, but to balance that out, I'll note that nearly everyone I've encountered there is dedicated and considerate. They really will read your profile, and most have sent me something really great and interesting. Unlike many Postcrossing users, they're also game to write a fair good bit on the back of the postcard. And it seems a lot of people have joined lately, so the more people that get active there, the more variety there is among senders.

I really only have two complaints:
*The character limit on profiles is severe. It's hard to write much. Most people link to their Postcrossing or Swap-bot profiles, and that's where I find real information about their likes and dislikes. The profiles allowed on Walltype really are super-tiny. But, as I said, you can link elsewhere for more info.
*The "contact us" page says "We try to read all messages same day," and maybe they do, but they don't bother to respond. I sent a couple of questions and comments to the site admin(s), and still haven't heard a word back. So prepare yourself to be in a fairly unmoderated database system. (Or the mods are having email/contact trouble and don't know about it.)

The postcard I used as an image for this post is one I made, for someone who really likes handmade postcards. I don't tend to make my own postcards, but sometimes it's fun when I'm in the mood, and I had fun with this one. (I hope rubber-stamping and a bit of coloring makes it hand-made!) The recipient is someone I'd happened to swap with recently on Swap-bot as well, so it was amusing to encounter her in two different realms like that.

So there's my Walltype wrap-up. My verdict? I enjoy it and will continue to send postcards there from time to time.