Lenna's MailArt Swap

My lovely and wonderful friend Lenna Andrews is hosting another exciting swap on her Creative Swaps blog. This time it's on the subject of Mail Art and you can read all about it (as well as sign up!) here. If you sign up you will receive a great PDF file, entirely dedicated to Mail Art, explaining what it is and suggesting techniques.

Needless to say I could not resist and once I had signed up and read Lenna's file I started work on the envelopes. It was about time to start using my new Inktense watercolor pencils and I made a grid of 1" squares on my envelopes and coloured them in. I then sprayed water over the squares which activates the Inktense colours and makes them more vibrant and also lets them run into each other. I also sprayed the envelopes with Moon Shadow Mists. After thoroughly drying the envelopes I went on to get out some of my favourite rubberstamps and Staz-On inkpads in a variety of colours and stamped away merrily. Of course I also typed Lenna's address with a suitable background colour and further adorned the envelope with my own address as well as an Airmail sticker. I've blocked out the addresses to be on the safe side!

Above is the back of the envelope, also embellished with stamps. The idea is to send the envelopes all to Lenna's address and she will then swap them out, also in an embellished envelope. So you will receive Lenna's envelope with 3 pieces of Mailart, mailed to her, inside.
If you're confused you can read all about this swap on Creative Swaps.

Lenna only required an empty envelope but that seemed a bit sad to me so I also made 4 fabric postcards as shown on this post, and enclosed these in a plastic sleeve and then put one into every adorned envelope. We only needed to make 3 for our Mail Art swap but I made an extra set for Lenna.

The postcards were made from a hand-painted and stamped fabric, that was ironed on to Fast2Fuse. I made clear tape transfers from images out of a vintage magazine (the Harmsworth Magazine, published in the late 19th C) and sewed these onto the background as shown. I added vintage lace or a peach vintage trim to the cards, and embellished further with beads around the images.

I then found vintage quotations that went with the various images.

Finally I scanned in the back of one of my vintage postcards, added the Swap information and my name + contact details and printed this out onto inkjet printable canvas. I sewed on a vintage postage stamp to this as well in keeping with our Mail Art theme,The canvas was ironed onto the other side of the Fast2Fuse and the edges finished with satin stitching using a variegated thread.

After I had put the postcards into the decorated envelopes I drove to our local postoffice which I engaged the help of our postmaster and together we selected 2 beautiful stamps to go on the front of the envelopes to cover the postage to Florida. The envelopes looked gorgeous with their stamps but you will have to wait to see them till they arrive with Lenna and she posts pictures on the Creative Swaps site! Then the 4 envelopes went in the mail bag this afternoon at 16.00 hrs. It will be interesting to see if they all arrive with Lenna on the same day too??!! So far this swap has already gladdened the hearts of 3 people (the postmaster, John and I). Hopefully it will have the same effect on everyone who handles the envelopes!