leisure

several home made brightly colored envelopes made from pages of an atlas

The coda to the last post is that I wound up with another consulting gig, same amount of time and over twice the pay. I am happy to be a person who lands on her feet.

This summer has been a nice mix of some work and some play. Staying off the internet is good for my mental health and yet I am bad at it. So I made an offline project which is my 50 x 50 project. I turn 50 in a few weeks. I am sending 50 cards and letters in the month before that. If you are reading this and we know each other in real life and I have your address, there is a decent chance I am sending you one. This started out with making notecards using a technique in a book called Creative Correspondence. It’s a fun book with simple suggestions. One of them is basically bubble stuff + sugar + food coloring + straw to make these cool lunar patterns on paper. After sending out a few moon-y postcards, I was doing some cleanup here with Kate, getting rid of extra books, broken books, bad books. One book was an old atlas that had grown some green fuzz on the outside. It had gotten as far as the recycle bin when Jim asked after it… weren’t there some good maps on the inside…? Jim is always a sucker for maps. And since the green fuzz was only on the OUTside, we took the inside of the atlas back inside the house and I’ve been using it for envelope making, another thing described in the book. In this one, you take one big piece of paper and fold it a few times and then you have an envelope that is held together just by the stamp on the front. It’s quite elegant.

So, you know me, perpetual helper-lady, I made a little photo-essay so other people can see how to make notecards and envelopes too. This is where I admit that the Virgo Month of Leisure starts tomorrow and I am busy already. I will make another post outlining my decade-plus of Virgo Month of Leisure fails. I did make a new little web page for it. #VirgoMOL What are you doing this month?