Incoming: postcards

My January 2 postcard swap receipts are trickling in; I have four out of ten so far. The one from @MistyLynne has the best backstory: she sent a postcard with a photo by Harvey Finkle, a Philly photographer whose work I've had the pleasure of displaying in the White Dog Cafe twice (coordinating the art there is another one of my jobs). I particularly love the postcard photo.


Misty writes on her profile, "The latest news from my house in Maryland: My husband and I decided to throw darts at the US map (without looking - that was humorous) and travel to where they landed. The results? This spring/summer, we will be heading to Socorro, New Mexico (his dart) and Jackpot, Nevada (my dart). I can't wait!" I bet all kinds of crazy coincidences will happen on that trip.

This card arrived from @JustMeTH81. My favorite part is the back! In fact it's just why I have ammonite tattoos, to remind me that anything worth doing takes a long-ass time:


I also got one from Battle Creek MI, by which I learned that Battle Creek is a world leader in breakfast cereals. (I'll store that away for the next trivia gameshow I'm on.)

And this one I particularly love. I thought boots were hard to run in:

Semi-related: two random but connected arrivals

The first comment on my explanatory post was from Boo Cartledge, who referred me to sendsomething.net, a site to which if you post your address, someone might mail you something. Not a week after I signed up, I got this from postmuse, a person smart enough to start mailing people her blank postcard collection one-by-one so she could get them back not so blank. My card depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence - particularly appropriate since one of my jobs is at the American Philosophical Society not 100 feet from Independence Hall. During the 10 years when Independence Hall was the nation's capitol, the APS hosted Charles Wilson Peale's museum that boasted a menagerie of live animals in the yard, so while the framers were doing important business, every now and then they were interrupted by the roar of a caged mountain lion out back.

Not much later I got this handmade card from commenter Boo herself, who is tearing up her 2003 book Grace: A Memoir and turning it into mail art. The full quote on the card reads "The only way to prevent the agonies human beings inflict on each other, I concluded, is to annihilate the human race." Whoa. It much be cathartic, ripping up this memoir.

January 2: Postcards

Day two didn't involve any particular craft either, though I did invest some time here. I was to send 10 postcards to each of 10 people. I've been collecting blank postcards for years, and there are some I won't let out of my collection (like the one captioned "early days of radio" that pictures a postage stamp from Antigua with Mickey & Minnie Mouse and a gramophone on it. The back is printed in Czech). Others I love enough that I want to share them, so I was glad to send these out. They went to Illinois, Michigan, California, Mississippi, Wyoming, France, two to Wisconsin, and two to Malaysia.

The swap specified that I should write what I do for a living on the card. This was fun, since right now I have several part-time jobs, half of which are on hiatus. Honestly, I don't know what the hell I do. So each card said something different; as I wrote I wondered if I have multiple personalities.

Pictured are a selection of the ten I mailed, all picked up in the Netherlands. The boek illustratoren card went to @Marineko, who works in the best bookstore in Jalan Melati Utama.

I spelled "career" wrong on this cat card, which went to @ladyrn. Sorry. To make up for it though, right this second Nova is sleeping on the part of my lap the computer isn't on, in pretty much the postcard cat's position.

This Donald Evans postcard, procured from the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam the day after I biked all the way around Texel (known for its unique breed of sheep), went to a stamp collector.


And this labor poster facsimile went to @scowlette in Chicago, student of history and labor studies.

Incoming: handmade needlecase

This swap introduced me to needlebooks - I'd never heard of them, even though they're uber-useful. Most of my needles were stored in an old pharmacy vial, just waiting to draw blood while I looked for the right one. But then Rochelle in Ireland sent me this amazing needlebook, which she completely tailored for me, right down to using natural fibers and reused materials, and even embroidering my name on the cover! I instantly installed my needles and took great pleasure in doing so.

Incoming: origami paper

I joined the origami paper swap (send at least 12 pages of origami paper to each of two partners) because I only know how to fold one thing from memory and figured it was about time to expand my repertoire. What better way to get inspiration than through the mail? The one thing I know how to fold is a lily (click for instructions). This lily made me many friends when I was traveling from Turkey to Barcelona over six months in 2000. If I wanted to meet someone I would fold them a lily in their line of sight which peaked their attention, and for the flourish at the end, I'd hand them the lily. It got the point across even when we didn't share a language. I still have two lily friends (if mostly on facebook).

@buzzbuzzbee and @swan already mailed me pages of origami paper for that swap, even though it's not due out the door until 20 January! @buzzbuzzbee went so far as to wrap it up impressively in this deer tree box. And she even designed and printed the images herself! Wow!


Inside I found these:


plus lots of smaller pages:

And these lovely sheets came from @swan. I love the dragonfly one on top best; I think I'll try this owl with it.

January 1: Photos

Obviously, I've pledged to mail a swap every day, not blog every day about mailing the swap.

I heard somewhere that whatever you do on NYE portends what you'll do most in the coming year, so I spent New Year's Eve making stuff. Specifically for swap projects. I wasn't particularly happy to be doing it alone, so I decided that new year's day counts in the prediction too, and we had some people over that evening for a lovely soiree. Even with all the previous night's preparation, I let myself off easy on January 1 with a photo swap.

The idea was to mail your partner one photo of any subject that you've taken. I couldn't decide between two I took on a trip to visit Fair Trade coffee farms in Chiapas, Mexico in 2005, so @IssueGirl got these two:

A candle stall in the San Cristobal market. My favorite thing about this photo is the single incandescent bulb that lit the shop. If it burned out, would the shopkeeper burn his stock?


I wandered around a bit while our guide Monika and the Maya Vinic cooperative farmers worked out a deal for shipping some containers of pergamon to the US (they were all sitting in a circle in the grass instead of around a glass table in a board room), and I found this radio facade stuck in a tree next to the warehouse where Maya Vinic stored their bagged coffee.

The story so far ...

I started this blog to squirrel away some of my found poems, hiding them in plain sight and not drawing attention to them. But now that I'm posting for public consumption, I have to lay them out: There they are, the first posts, for everyone to ignore, because they're not the point anymore. Until another one comes along, then it might sneak in here.

The point now is, I've joined the fun at the fun-a-day project by artclash again this year, having chosen a project and pledged to do one thing for that project every day in January. At the same time, anyone else who wants to is working on their own project, then we all get together at Studio 34 on February 14 and show off our goods to each other and everyone else. This will be the fifth year Artclash has been at it; it'll be my second year participating. My first year, I made 31 stencils, and those became the custom prayer flags I make.

This year, I'm making art for its own sake, for its exploration and communication value. As soon as I start making stuff for the purpose of selling it, it becomes not-so-much art to me. It's the process that I get the most out of, not the finished product, so I constantly need to be making something new if I'm going to learn anything. The year 2008 has mostly been about laying fallow, grounding myself, taking things in and breaking them down. In 2009 it's time for things to start pouring out again, having magically recombined into something not immediately recognizable. It is, after all, the year of the ox.

I'm using this year's fun-a-day project as a jumping off point and doing a swap a day, making stuff and mailing it to somebody I've never met, in exchange for getting something similar from someone who's never met me. Every day I get to make/mail something completely different from the day before, while under the same rubric. Brought to me by swap-bot. Then at the end of the project, I'll show off everything I've gotten next to pictures of everything I've sent. And I'm gonna blog about the whole thing too!