Catching up on a month’s worth of blogging in one day, I really need to plug the (not-so-new-any-more) book Good Mail Day by Jenny Hinchcliff & Carolee Gilligan Wheeler.  I’m taking my time working my way through it, because it’s packed with ideas and resources for just about every aspect of mail art you could possibly be interested in.

Chapter 3, ‘The Traveling Mail Art Kit’, really captured my imagination & I started to think straight away what would comprise my own essential mail art kit.   I’d love to share, but I’ve set up a mail art kit swap over at Swap-Bot, and I don’t want to ruin any surprises for my partners, should they happen to stop by here.  But I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks of as their mail art essentials (it’s such a personal thing) – I’ll probably be inspired by your ideas, & then still ruin a surprise, anyway .  And you’ll probably hear more about my own kit as time goes by…

Find out more from the authors through their blog – where you can see all the cool mail art they have been receiving – and also at the Pod Pod Post website (which looks great, but I was disappointed by how few of the shop items are actually available).

Over the last 6 months or so, I have acquired a few zines about mail art, & my opinion (so far) is that by far the most interesting is All This is Mine.  ATIM is a zine & a website.  The zine covers different subjects, but Issue 12 is all about letter-writing & while it’s not entirely about mail art, it’s still one of the most interesting I have read on the subject.  And it comes with a packet of random postal labels as well, which is very cool.

If the random labels are more interesting to you than a zine about letter-writing, you’re in luck, because the ATIM website also sells absolutely awesome hand-collated themed packs of random stationery.  Whether you see ephemera for artwork or original accessories for your correspondence in these packs, they are absolute essentials for mail lovers and creative letter-writers everywhere.  I want one!

“Each week, a decorated matchbox with a tiny present hidden inside is left by a girl (and sometimes willing friends) somewhere in her travels. It’s a random act of semi-artistic kindness aimed at disrupting someone’s day in a tiny but positive way. That’s if they dare to pick it up…”

I came across the site for The Matchbox Project yesterday, & it has set me thinking about what cool things might be left in a matchbox, to be randomly left behind & randomly found by total strangers.     Of course, it might be the perfect ’shell’ for a zinebomb - just reduce templates to just under 1/4 original size & they will fit into a 32ct matchbox!

Blogland is probably giving up on me given my very sparse posting in recent months, but I am still here, and I am still creating & working on stuff.  I’ve recently added a couple of new things to my Etsy store:

Lost & Found is the first of my new fairy tale explorations to see the light of day (not Baba Yaga, but that is still on the way, I promise!).  It’s an A6/quarter-size zine, which includes a revised version of the fairy tale ‘The Princess & the Pea’ (not aimed at kids), random notes about my thought processes behind & ideas for the story, a (very short!) poem, and a cross stitch pattern, so you can embroider your own illustration!  (see the etsy listing for more details & pics)

PostScript is a zine I wrote a few months ago, but got put aside while I was working on other things.  It is also A6 size, & includes a complete postcard recycling kit (labels to transform any piece of scrap card or photo etc into a mail-able postcard), details of various international postcard projects you can take part in, craft projects (carve a postcard, a secret postcard, a postcard notebook, and a handwoven postcard), and lots of other random postcard-related musings, info & reviews.  One of the coolest things about this zine is that it is not only about postcard, but it actually is a postcard, too!  (The zine transforms into a self-mailer, addressed to you on the back cover.)

And finally (for today – there will be more to follow!), if you love getting mail that isn’t bills, bank statements & junkmail, it’s time to join the P.P.P. Club.  P.P.P. stands for Post Post Post, and is a celebration of all things postal!  Whether you’re a fan of postcards, mail art, faux postage, or everyday postal paraphernalia, this club is designed for you.  Your membership bundle includes:

• A membership card that doubles as a postal record book (& includes a P.P.P. manifesto for you to sign!)
• Free personalised address labels & faux postage in the P.P.P. Postal Book (this is where you find out what the P.P.P. is really all about!)
• A copy of PostScript (see above for description)
• Discount on everything in the P.P.P. category of my Etsy Store (items to be added soon)

Life is hectic, but I will be trying very hard to update here more regularly, so you can see what’s going on .

What’s a zinalogue?  Well, it’s a catalogue of zines.  Obviously.  ;-)

It works sort of like a friendship book, except you use it to promote the zines you have available to trade and buy.  All you need to do is make a small booklet(/mini-zine), add in the details of your zine/s along with a handful of blank pages; then every time you trade a zine with someone include a copy of your zinalogue.  The theory is, it gets passed around every time a zine is traded, and each person who handles the booklet adds their own zine/contact details.  You include your own home address on the back of your zinalogue, so that once the blank pages are full it will eventually return home to you, full of info about the zines that are ‘out there’ in the world.

Why?  Well, it’s just a way of promoting your own zines – because who knows who the person you traded with last will trade with next?  Your zinalogue could realistically reach zinesters all over the world, whose zines you might otherwise never have heard of, and who might otherwise never have heard of yours.  It’s mutually beneficial to everyone who contributes a label, business card or promo to a page, because their zine info will be seen by a random bunch of zinesters, too.  Then when your zine returns home, you can while away the hours checking out the links of everyone who has contributed to your zinalogue.  A nice idea would be to include an extra zinalogue (with unfilled return address) when you send one asking for the recipient to contribute, then they can play, too.  Don’t forget to add your details to one of the blank pages, first!

Ultimately, if enough people start filling and passing zinalogues, you could even trade full zinalogues (once you’ve either made a note of the details you’re interested or traded with everyone therein!).  There are always going to be new zinesters, and old zinesters with new zines to find out about, so why not try it?

I’ve added a couple of templates (A4 & letter-size) that you can print & fold directly, add your details & get started!

Inspired by Harriet Russell’s adventures in puzzlingthe post office with her puzzled envelopes, I have just created the Puzzled Postcard Project (P.P.P., for short!).

If you’re up for a challenge, it’s time to get creative!  Create a puzzle for my postal address, mail it to me, and in return, I will send you a free mini-zine featuring your Puzzled Postcard alongside others I have received.

This is going to be an ongoing project (feel free to contribute more than once!), and I will make a more detailed record (yes, probably in zine-form) of all postcards sent and received, as well as other interesting bits and pieces, once the project has been running for a while.  Please check out the full details, and ask if I can clarify any details not covered there.  :-)

I decided that I was making life unnecessarily complicated for myself by having 2 separate Etsy stores, so from this day forth, you will find all Tangled Press zines (etc) incorporated in the TangleCrafts Etsy Store.  There are new things coming soon, so – as always! – watch this space!  (But bear with me – it might take a while to extract all the redundant links…)

I’ve had some great updates in the last week! And it’s always cool to see what other people are working on, so if you’ve been inspired to try something by one of my kits or zines, do let me know so that I can share

First up today is Sharon Schmeidel – back in January, she bought one of my ATC weaving kits and has been weaving away ever since. In her own words, tapestry weaving has become “another passion I should probably have done without”! The scale has increased somewhat since her ATC-sized beginnings – I’m sure you’ll agree with me that this wall-hanging is pretty awesome! Sharon is a member of the Iowa Art Quilters Group, and this piece has been on display in Grenell, Iowa, over the summer, at a show in conjunction with an area weaving conference. Cool!

I was also really happy to see Robin O. Mayberry’s post on her Alchemy Studio blog, about the bookmark she doodle-stitched, after I sent her a copy of my new ‘Contours’ zine, less than a month ago! The zine is all about doodles, and at the very last minute, I decide to include a bookmark as an extra. I didn’t have time to trial the concept first, so I just hoped that it would work – and it looks like it did – hurrah! Huge thanks to Robin for being my guinea pig & actually trying it out . If you would like to try it yourself, every bookmark that comes with the Contours zine is hand-doodled, and will be similar but different to Robin’s, so your doodle-stitching is guaranteed to be unique.

And last but not least, I received a great piece of post from Kristina Howells in France. I’ve been taking part in some faux postage projects, lately (although Kristina was very quick off the mark with this one, & I haven’t created, let alone sent my response, yet!). The envelope I received from Kristina had 2 ‘real’ stamps at the top, which had been duly postmarked, but also a faux postage stamp just beneath – and what tickled me was that the faux stamp had also been postmarked! I hadn’t got too far yet with my ideas for the faux postage project, but receiving this really prompted me to give it some thought & I’m itching to get started, now…

Well, it looks like I’ve not been up to much but that is definitely very far from the truth! The last week has been spent almost solely fulfilling Etsy orders (everyone’s gone Borrowers crazy!), and because I’m a fool & make all my zines with lots of extra bits, it gets very time-consuming putting everything together.  I ran out of one of the key components, but I think that worked out okay in the end, as I created a cute little addendum, with a substitute for the missing item…  Oh, and I had my first 2 Folksy sales last week, too, so that was also quite exciting – although definitely no competition for Etsy, as yet!

I say I’ve been solely fulfilling orders, but of course, that’s not really the case, as I’ve also been working on several new (related) ideas.  One is nearly complete, and the others are still at germination stage, but they’re definitely sprouting…  Will post more details once I’ve got all these orders underway!

Does anyone know the story of Baba Yaga?  That’s what one of my new projects is based on: a Russian/Eastern European folk tale about a witch who lives in a hut on chicken legs (to minimise the kernel of the story to the extreme!).  My first encounter with Baba Yaga was when I was 6 years old.  After a day trip to Cumbria where my sister and I made a wish in a wishing well, we went to bed and forgot all about it.  The next day, there was a letter waiting for us from ‘the fairies’.  They explained very sweetly, that they were sorry but they could not supply the item/s we had actually wished for.  However, they hoped that we would be happy with the record that they had left for us instead.

This was in the days before CDs even existed, and the record was a bright yellow vinyl.  For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you what it was my sister and I actually wished for, but believe me, the excitement of a yellow record was more than a good enough substitute for me!  On the record was a story.  That story was Baba Yaga.  I can’t say that the story shaped my formative years any more than any other fairy tale that I remember, but it is a story that keeps finding its way back into my life.

So look out for a Baba Yaga-shaped ’something’ coming soon to TangleCrafts; and in the meantime, check out these cool projects elsewhere, that I found while I was ‘researching’: A Baba Yaga doll (from SmallWorks) that you can turn upside down and magically transforms into her nemesis, Vasilissa the Fair/the Wise/the Brave; and a Baba Yaga plushie hut, complete with chicken legs from Melissa Sue Stanley!  The doll reminds me of one my Grandma made (one each for me & my sister) when I was little, which was a ragdoll Cinderella & broom one way up, then transformed into a glamorous Cinderella in beaded ballgown when turned upside down.  Why did I not keep these things…?

Despite a lack of blogging activity here which may suggest the contrary, I have been busy busy busy all week!  Well, I took a week’s holiday from ‘real’ work – caught up with a friend, saw my mum & dad (my dad has been in China for the last 6 months or so, so that was an especial treat), and went on a day trip with Corey – the highlight of which was probably when he left his umbrella behind on the train there, but found it again on the train back!  But around these brief outings I have been working non-stop.  There are some new things very nearly ready to tell you about, but the most immediate, are 2 new zines (& something else a bit different), now available in my Etsy stores:

The first is ‘Contours’, my first art zine, which is all about doodling.  This is where my brief encounter with Zentangling led me.  I suddenly realised how the majority of the patterns I have designed as an adult all stem from one basic doodle that I used to doodle all the time.  The zine looks at how that doodle has emerged in the various crafts I have worked in, considers the possible origins of the doodle, and leaves lots of spaces for you to doodle away to your own heart’s content.

As you can see from the photo, there are some extras included – hand-doodled bookmark to stitch, and a hand-doodled ‘fingerprint’ of lino to carve & print.  Inside the zine you will also find a 4-way Acorns cross stitch chart, Bobbin Along freeform bargello pattern, plus 4 postcards (2 printed, and 2 blank for you to doodle yourself) printed on gummed paper, so that you can turn any piece of scrap card into a postcard, (these come with 4 postcard reverse labels which could also be used as envelope re-use labels, if you prefer).  Check out the TangleCrafts Etsy Store for more details.

Hot on the heels of Papertrail #1, you can now also find Papertrail #2.  Papertrail #2 is a zine full of questions and books and reading habits, with answers/opinions from me, Corey, and spaces for your own responses, too.  It’s all about books, and how we live with them.  Alongside everything else is a Papertrails ‘map’ of routes you can take from novel to novel, spaces to design your own book jackets, plus copy-&-cut bookplates & bookmarks.  And as if all that wasn’t enough, Papertrail #2 also includes a free membership pack for the Papertrail Reader’s Club!

The Papertrail Reader’s Club is there for everyone who loves to read.  The Basic Membership Pack includes:

• 2 pre-gummed Ex Libris plates
• 2 recommendation bookmarks left blank for you to personalise
• and the Member Book:

The Papertrail Readers’ Club Book is a membership card and reader’s record book combined! It is a 20 page, staple-bound mini-booklet, printed on high quality recycled sugar papers. Each book will be personalised with your name and membership number, and date stamped with the start date of your membership. It includes spaces to list all the books you want to read alongside dates started & finished, and there are even pages to fill in with your own mini-reviews! 

Each month, a different book is chosen as a feature title, with review printed inside the back cover.  Club members are eligible to submit their own reviews of the club titles which may earn them a free Papertrail zine!

If you buy any issue of Papertrail, you will receive free membership to the Reader’s Club, including the current month’s club review.  If you don’t want to buy the zine, you can still buy a one-off membership to the club with a Basic Membership Package.  And if you fill your record book quickly, or just want another, a Renewal Membership Package is available at a reduced price.

Told you I’d been busy .  And this is just the tip of the iceberg!