Dabbling in Mail Art

I've had mail art on my mind.

For the past several months, I've sent plenty of handmade postcards through the mail, but I have not revisited the kind of mail art pictured in one of my favorite books, Good Mail Day, by Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler. 

But then Christel sent me those delightful handmade envelopes in a recent swap, and Tammy at Daisy Yellow posted some great mail art links in a recent post. 

I was reminded of my first mail art effort, in 2009.  A friend of mine organized a mother-daughter camping trip in the Delaware Water Gap.  I sent a thank-you note afterward in an envelope I made from a brochure about the area, decorated with a skeleton leaf, words cut from magazines (such as "mother," "child," "getaway"), and labels and stickers.  It was my very first work of mail art.

That gave me the idea of making several envelopes from brochures I picked up when I went on vacation.  My family visited Monticello that same year, so I created a series of "souvenir envelopes," made from tourist brochures.  I cut and pasted pictures and words from various brochures onto the envelopes, and thought they would make a nice souvenirs for my girls from their first visit to an important American historical site:

A closer look:

For the future, I thought it might be fun to tuck a postcard inside of each handmade envelope I made from the places we visit, with a little letter to the girls about what they saw.  As they get older, they could write the postcard themselves, with their own chosen memories.  Wouldn't that make a nice collection for them as they are growing up? 

It's amazing how many different envelopes you can make from just four or five brochures!

Looking back at this project from 2009 (and finishing a couple of the envelopes that I left incomplete) bit me with the envelope-making bug, so I've been making some more from magazine pages I've saved over time:

It's such a satisfying pasttime, because the envelopes are quick to make, and look so fun and colorful when they are finished.  Three of the envelopes in the back were made with old pages from Somerset Studio magazine.  The leaves are from the cover of a catalog that came in the mail.  The envelope on the front left is a picture of a closet, and the one on the front right is someone's desk; who knew they would make such fun-looking envelopes?

Then I started decorating small manila envelopes with collage images:

I love these; they really show my preferred "style," with text, musical scores, vintage images of women, and ephemera from an old BINGO game.

Mail art is the kind of thing that I will always come back to again and again.  It is fun to create, fun to send, and fun to incorporate into other artwork, such as journals. 

I am always looking for new examples of creative mail art, so please leave any fun links you might know of in the Comments section, so we can all explore new sources of mail art inspiration!