Letters, pen pals & smash books

Smash books remind me of the crazy little journals I kept as a youngster and the supplies available for making this modern version of the scrap book/art journal are just too much for me to resist any longer. I've seen some very cool smash books and decided today that it was time to combine my curiosity of them with letter writing and pen pals. I have a small stash of Moleskines I haven't used yet and one of those will be my first smash book.

I think I might start a round robin sort of thing and send the smash book to others who are interested in adding to it then sending it on to the next person or back to me. If I do that, anyone would be welcome, even those who, like me, aren't very creative. Those interested in art/journaling would be welcome to add whatever they choose to it. I think it could be a neat project and a lot of fun.

I'm also going to use one of my larger Moleskines to create a new correspondence smash log. I'm not sure yet exactly how I'll do it but I think it would be wise to organize it by date rather than person. Perhaps a tab for the month then fill the pages with notes about what I received from whom, what I sent out and to whom, photos of the actual letters, my thoughts on them, etc. It would certainly be more interesting than the spiral notebooks I've used all these years! I don't think I'll switch entirely to that concept for keeping track of correspondence because that would be too time consuming for me. But to make one now and then would be fun, I think.

Today I picked up a few things for LetterMo, general correspondence and creating the small smash book. I just happened on them and had a few dollars on me so I bought what I could; stickers, three small booklets of pages, some smash tape, and a smash pen.

Be still, my heart!

Experiments gone wrong...sort of

When I was a freshman in high school I attended a very small school in a very small town in north Texas. The English teacher, Mrs. P., was the wife of the principal and was fairly strict and not liked by most students. I enjoyed the class, though, and even liked her as a person and teacher. She encouraged creativity among her pupils and I knew that was a good thing.

During that school year we read "Silas Marner" aloud in class and that classic became one of my favorites. After we finished the story, Mrs. P. separated us into groups for a special project. Each group was to create a replica of a newspaper that would have been typical of the early 19th century. Each group had an editor, main writer, advertising person, and distributor. Mrs. P. provided basic guidelines, plenty of encouragement, but only a few ideas. She expected us to accomplish this task with a minimum of help.

I could write a separate and very long entry about how stressful, yet fun, that project was. It involved a lot of research in libraries (for this was in that time long ago when computers were unheard of by most and the internet certainly didn't exist), hours spent with the other students in my group, learning to use a calligraphy pen, and quite a bit of frustation on my part. In the end, we produced a lovely newspaper representing the time period of the book and each member of my group was rewarded with an A+. Long after the project was finished, our paper hung on a wall in the school office for all to see.

But this entry really isn't about that newspaper. It's about experiments gone wrong.

When we created the newspaper, we had to research ways to "antique" the newsprint we used. We learned there were many ways to give the paper the desired look and we chose to use tea bags, water, paint brushes, and paper towels. The first few attempts were horrible. We left the paper in the tea not long enough, then too long. We discovered that writing on the paper after it had soaked in tea and dried was almost impossible and that we'd chosen the incorrect ink. With quite a bit of time and a lot of failures we hit on the right combination of tea, water, brushes, soaking time, drying time, ink, and nibs.

Almost 40 years have passed since I helped create that newspaper but this morning I decided to try my hand at making an antique looking postcard. The project didn't take too long but as the picture below shows, the result is less than spectacular.

The color is about right but the warping and smudged ink aren't impressive. I did use pigment ink but that's what I had on hand. Overall, I somewhat like the general appearance of the card. I'm going to put it under some heavy books and see if it flattens a little then mail it out to the person for whom it's intended. I want to know if it will withstand USPS abuse and that's the only way I know of to find out.

So lovely readers, what should I have done differently? Obviously pigment ink wasn't the best choice but what ink would have been better? And is there something I could have done to prevent the warping or is dealing with it after the fact the best way to go?

All in all I wouldn't call this a failure but a learning experience. "Learning experience" sounds so much better than "failure", doesn't it?