Pen Pal / Happy Mailing with Geraldine

 
For October I received the Happy Mail Brimbles box. The happy mail box is described as being "solely aimed at providing you with the goodies to write / send to someone else. Some of the items that you could receive are: Post cards, note cards, greetings cards, paper, envelopes, letter writing sets, tags, ribbon, gift wrap, stickers, washi tape, pens, paper clips, anything that you would use in writing to someone or sending them a gift." As you can see from the image above it had both autumnal and Halloween themes. At the moment I am getting back into snail mail. I have kept my penpal list intentionally short as I'm building my collection of stationery and ephemera especially for it. I really want to go all out as I used to years ago. What I wanted to show in today's post, however, is what can be achieved when you don't have an endless supply of stickers, washi etc. If you have never received a happy mail box and are new to snail mail then you can start from your very first box and get creative in your own unique way, putting your individual stamp on each item. This gives your mail the personal touch.

  I use my sewing machine for a lot of projects, so it seemed fitting to integrate this into my mail. If you don't have one then you can always sew by hand. I stuck down one of the fabric sticky labels onto the brown envelope, both of which are included in the box and, picking a complementary colour thread, I sewed a couple of lines of straight stitches.  

 I then used some washi I had bought from Mrs Brimbles shop to decorate the rest of the envelope. The matching letter paper had beautiful narrow lines for me to write. In fact, one thing about this months box is that Anna included paper with both narrow and wide lines. Now, if you subscribe to this box on a regular basis you will find you have a nice little collection of items to use together for your snail mail. On this occasion, as I had received a happy mail box previously, I had left over a couple of bits I could use. Namely a sticky address label. The quote found on this particular envelope didn't apply to my penpal I'm writing to, and it also blocked the space for an address. So the sticky label came in handy. Again, I used a little washi from Anna's shop.  

Next, I had another penpal to write to so I decided to use the other gorgeous paper with an autumnal theme. This was the paper with the wide lines. It didn't have complementary envelopes, which was good as I could use a plain white one and jazz it up with the little supplies I had. Just a couple of stickers which, admit it we all have, and some washi transforms a plain old envelope! Recognise the stamp from the last box?

  

As you can see with this last letter I completely veered away from autumnal colours! I don't know, I just struggled with the whole autumnal colour scheme this year. But that's the beauty of creativity. There are no rules! You are free to explore and that's what I have done and will do with each box I get. I really hope you enjoy this post and that it encourages you to get creative with what you have in your own personal style. Items I used, other than from this months box were: "With love" stamp: Hobbycraft Bunny sticker: The Idea Owl "Hello There" Sticker: T K Maxx Stationery Section. And the "For You" stamp was given to me by a penpal.

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