Mail it

As I am still struggling with my night sky, and am resolved to not actively think about other projects (that is I am trying not to think about the tree picture I took while hiking the paths on Mount Jefferson and how much I've always wanted to do something around the way leafless trees look against the sky).

See how good I am at ignoring it...


So I thought I'd share some of my mailart research with you. These links were the ones I thought sounded really cool that I found on the other links page of the postcrossing website. Some are about sharing an object and watching it travel the world (think of that gnome in the Amelie movie) and sometimes it about sharing a creation.

Mostly I just wish I was either talented enough or a lot less stingy to take part in some of these sites:

(and they are arranged in a ranked listing, starting with the ones I'm most interested in)

1. postcrossing: send a postcard, get a postcard from around the world
2. ToyVoyagers: oh yes, toys traveling the world depending on the kindness of strangers
3. International Girl Aereogrammes: making a letter that is also the envelope and mailing it
4. PostSecret: you have probably heard of this one but who doesn't enjoy a little cathartic release now and then
5. BookCrossing: Share your books with people all over the world who wish to read them...

I love and hate the BookCrossings idea...love because what is more fun than sharing books with people who want to read them (hello, librarian). Hate because if say, one of my books is out there hopping around the globe, I can't read it and that upsets me.

See, I said I was stingy.

One day...

So, (I begin so many things this way, perhaps writing on a daily basis will allow me to correct such annoying behavior...I also have many asides sitting smack dab in the middle of my posts) one day at work I was working on an interlibrary loan with a patron for this interesting contemporary art magazine anthology, Hi-fructose vol 1, and as she works over at a local post office we begin talking about mail...

I love getting mail, real mail: Letters, cards, postcards. They have to have some substance to them as well, a card with a cool graphic or a letter filled with different thoughts and weird ideas. Postcards with fake names written instead of my own (I have to admit here that I never have received such a postcard, I'm often the sender: Here's to you Sailor Rosner and Ma & Pa Kettle).

Upon this revelation, the patron begins telling me about mail art (I know I'm referencing wikipedia and I'm a librarian but it is a good general description with history and this isn't an academice paper). Basically artists create these mailable works of art, letter or postcard, and send them out to different people who place calls for pieces. She told me to look it up...so I did.

I'll get more into what I found but what I realized was this is for me. I'm not a real artists in any sense, but I do love to create and I love getting mail....

So.

Welcome to Amateur Hour, my adventures in mail art....