Postcard Swap Part 2

In yesterday’s post, I described the first half of my process for creating postcards for iHanna’s international Postcard Swap. Today, I’ll finish the story!

After choosing background papers, as well as papers and pictures to create borders around each card, I looked for ten favorite quotations to include on the cards. I have all kinds of collections of quotations—I’ve been saving favorites since I was a kid—so this part of the process was both easy and fun.

At first, I planned to put the quotations on the cards using a mix of rubber stamping and handwriting. Here are the first two cards I made:

I wasn’t completely happy with the results, and I decided to rely completely on my own handwriting. Scary! I, like so many other people, am not generally a fan of my own handwriting. But I decided to use a black chisel-tip Sharpie, write in cursive, and then outline the letters in white gel pen. For quotations that were especially long, I only did this for select words, writing the rest in regular cursive. After using ultra-fine Sharpies to create loose, free-hand border lines around the edges of the cards, here is the final result for the other eight cards:

Throughout the process of making my postcards, I kept reminding myself to leave time for “the boring part”—that is, the back of the cards. I kept thinking of it as “the boring part”! But once I decided how I wanted the backs to look, and started stamping, I liked the simple, clean look of them almost as much as I liked the busy, colorful front sides. I created the backs on separate pieces of 4”x6” cardstock, and then glued them to the first parts of the cards that I created.

Now the postcards are finished, and I am ready to write my messages on the back and take them to the post office. Four of the cards will then be on their way to Canada, four will move along to other places in the United States, one will head to the UK, and one will go to the Netherlands. And I will await the arrival of ten works of art from around the world right in my mailbox!