Snail Mail

I for one LOVE to get mail. It's part of my obsession with cloth diapers. They result in lots of "fluffy mail". I love to get mail, however I am terrible at GIVING mail. The packaging, the calculating postage, the driving to the post office...it typically results in me just accumulating things that are meant for somebody and then waiting until I see them in person to hand it all over. Most of these people I see once or twice a year, so you can imagine the list of things I was supposed to give them but forgot because I was too distracted by being excited to actually see them!

This weekend though I put together a little package with gifts for Grandma and Grandpa (the dropcloth rug Willie made them), a Father's Day gift for Grandpa (beautiful shirts from J. Crew and Gap - new with tags at Goodwill!), and a couple of quail shirts I made for my mom and my second mom Sabine (really for Sabine's birthday, but I didn't know which color shirt she'd like best so my mom gets whichever one Sabine doesn't want) I basically added a quail mama to the quail papa and baby I had on this baby shirt. Here's how they turned out:

I think they're pretty cute.

Typically when I get the gumption to send snail mail, I feel so proud of myself for getting the basics involved accomplished that I often forego wrapping the gift portion of the package. I went the extra mile this time though - I swaddled my Dad's shirts in some brown paper, the tshirts in some blue tissue and then thought up a fun way to embellish without putting a bunch of work into pretty bows that would only be smushed in the box. For this I turned to my super cool xyron sticker maker.

I dug up some great old photos of my Dad being the great father that he is, photocopied them and used my circle cutter to well, cut them into circles. Then I sent them through my sticker maker:

That top one is a photo of him when he worked in the woods in Northern California when I was just a baby. Like me, my Dad has had a very random collection of very diverse jobs over the years....

Anyway, then I stuck them on the package. Voila!

Cute, huh?

I used some previously made stickers for the tshirt package - I'd cut them from an Anthropolgie (yum) catalog:

So there you have it, fun with snail mail. The sticker maker is a great way to turn all those drool-worthy photos in magazines, or cool pictures in children's books that are falling apart at the seams and what not into nice embellishments for any surface that will take a sticker. They're not too spendy either. I got mine on ebay I think for $17 but you can buy them for like $20 at walmart - price varies according to size. You also have to buy refill cartridges for the stickum, so if you're gonna make a ton of stickers it might get a bit pricey. But for at-home small scale decorating like this? Just the trick!