OUTGOING: Strawberries

Last month I started writing with Ingrid, whose awesome blog I have been following for ages. We decided to start an abc-snailmail project, which basically means we send eachother themed snailmail following the letters of the alphabet. So, I kicked off the project with the letter A, then Ingrid sends something back with a theme that starts with a B, etcetera. Such an easy idea, but it boosts your creativity like crazy!

Picking a theme with the letter A was easypeasy: the dutch word for strawberries is "aardbeien", my fav summer fruit, so strawberries it was! I was looking forward to trying some new things and materials, let me take you through some pictures of the mini-package I sent her.

Let's start with an overview of my strawberry mail. I like making my own writing sheets, using various kinds of decoration. For this snailmail, I kept it simple with some red and green watercolor and a black fineliner: hello strawberry stationery. Tied together with my all time favorite baker's twine. I also made Ingrid a blank strawberry postcard. I used some scraps of kraft paper and small dots of glue to create a 'weave'-pattern, and on top of that I glued some mini strawberries cut from paper. And then for the red mystery package at the bottom...

...this strawberry garland was inside! These days most of my letters seem to include some kind of crochet project, I can't emphasize how much I love crochet. I cut some strawberries from red paper. Well, at first they looked like a three-year-old's attempt of cutting hearts, but once I drew tiny seeds on them and crocheted the garland and crowns the red shapes started to look like strawberries ;-)

My masterpiece! I made a felt strawberry envelope! I was super excited about this, since it pretty much turned out like the picture in my head. Take into account this was my first time using felt, I gave myself a small pat on the back. It took quite some time to stitch it all together (how do other people make this seem so easy?), but I discovered two major benefits of felt as an envelope: 1) it's super light! So no worries about sending heavy creative snailmail. This whole package, including letter and bits and pieces weighed 42 grams. And 2) it survived its journey very well. Ingrid already wrote a blogpost about it, the envelope made it in one piece.

Now let's all dig into the last strawberries of this summer, enjoy!

Love,
Anne