short-cuts, but only when desperate

I can still remember the year I had to admit that my winter holiday mailing list had grown too long to send original hand-made cards to each person on it. I was swallowed by guilt at the time, but the list grows longer every year.

Getting my favorite seasonal etegami made into glossy postcards by a professional printer is one solution that I've tried, but many of my friends and family have expressed a strong preference for the tactile qualities of original washi etegami. And hating to disappoint, I've cast about for a better solution to the problem. For a while I printed my chosen image on the thick washi cards that I generally use when I hand-paint the originals. This produced printed cards that were hard to tell apart from the original etegami, but I gave it up after it wrecked my printer head twice in two years.

Recently I tried printing my holiday etegami image on iron-on washi sheets. I sell pads of these on my Etsy shop and I always keep a stock for my personal use. They are intended for converting ordinary blank postcards into washi cards for etegami, but I never meant for them to be used with a printer. Still, the results were pretty good. They were thin enough to go through the printer without excessively burdening the printer head, and after I ironed them onto ordinary blank postcards they retained the soft, slightly fuzzy feel of washi. The self-adhesive washi sheets work well for this too, but they're a bit more expensive. I pass the sheets through my printer one sheet at a time to prevent their getting stuck inside.

beyond washi

The first time it hit me that etegami (at least a non-traditional version of it) could be done on material other than washi, was when one of my etegami colleagues showed me a card cut out of corrugated cardboard. The card had been cut out so that the logo of a cantaloupe was on one side, leaving the rest of the card free for a thank-you note. Other clever cut-outs and drawings decorated the blank spaces on both sides of the card. It turned out that my colleague sends a case of fruit to this woman every year, and every year, she returns a thank-you card crafted from the cardboard carton that contained the fruit.

Once or twice, I have run out of washi postcards and had to make do with cutting cards from old file folders. I blogged about it here. But it's been my recent exposure to international mail artists who cut their cards from old cereal and cookie boxes that really got me thinking about the possibilities. As appealing as the idea of recycling old cookie boxes is, it simply isn't possible to reproduce on such material the lines an ink brush makes on washi.

That's where this nifty product comes in useful: iron-on washi. These thin sheets of washi-like paper come 50 to a pack. They respond to sumi ink and gansai paints very much like ordinary washi postcards do. And they're much cheaper, so it doesn't hurt so much throw a sheet away if you mess it up. They're perfect for making etegami out of otherwise unsuitable card material. I dug out some great oriental-patterned boxes that had once contained traditional Japanese confections, thinking the postcards I could make from them would be sure to please someone with an eye for beautiful patterns. I painted my pictures on the iron-on washi sheets and ironed the drawings onto the un-patterned sides of my make-shift cards, leaving the patterned sides for address labels and postage stamps. They turned out great. So great, I almost don't want to send them....