stamp people (the sparkler)

In Japan, August is the month for school vacation, cool cotton kimonos called yukata, hand-held flat fans called uchiwa, honoring deceased ancestors, telling ghost stories, and community festivals with folk dancing and firework displays. 

I've always been partial to the hand-held sparklers called senkou-hanabi (incense sparklers) myself. When the sparkling ball at the end of the thin stick dulls and plops to the ground, we are reminded that summer (like life) does not last forever. Which is the sort of bitter-sweet, melancholic symbolism that delights the Japanese soul. 

The writing on this Stamp People collage is in Japanese, and translates to: "When You Sparkle The World Sparkles With You." You can see that I tried to hide the hands on the postage stamp by adding hair. But it doesn't quite work. Cute stamp though, isn't it?

stamp people (the baby)

It was bound to happen. The Stamp People series has a baby! Little bit of a quote from Charles Dickens.

stamp people

It has been two years since I first encountered Jacki Long's "stamp people." I was utterly charmed from the very start, and I couldn't wait to imitate her style. But the idea must have needed time to ferment deep inside of me, because I couldn't seem to act on my intentions.

Two weeks ago, I was dusting off a stack of stamp albums that remained from a long forgotten childhood passion. This led to the merciless culling of a box full of cooking magazines I'd meant, but failed, to throw into the recycling bin.

Suddenly, the time was ripe, and stamp people collages began popping out of me at the pace of one a day.  It has been LOADS of fun.

The postage stamps themselves are rather boring as stamps go, but the men depicted on them rightly earned their places there, and their stories and characters are fascinating. So here I present to you my first crop of stamp people collages. From the top: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, John Muir, Albert Einstein, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Many more are on their way. Prints are available from my RedBubble portfolio.

more fun with etegami frames

It started with a frenzy of decluttering, except that I got distracted by some old Japanese songbooks that were destined for the recycling bin. Without a clear idea of where I was headed with it, I cut some of the colorful pages into strips, and wove them together into mats. I glued them to pieces of corrugated cardboard cut out in rectangles and circles, trimmed the excess paper, and brushed some glossy sealer over the woven paper surface to anchor the strips. After that, my mind went blank, so I set the project aside for the next two months.

Then, last week, a surprise package arrived from an etegami friend in southern Japan. It was a picture frame she had made from layers of corrugated cardboard. You can see it on my received mailart blog. I was too lazy to imitate her design, but it did give me ideas for what to do with my unfinished paper strip mats. 

My original idea had been to display my etegami on the "mats," the four corners of the etegami held down by elastic string threaded through the back of the mat, much like the typical etegami frames sold in Japanese shops. But now I'm experimenting with the possibilities presented by layering two or more sheets of corrugated cardboard with a window cut into the top layer, giving the frame some depth. 

righthand etegami affixed to top of mat;
lefthand etegami nestled in a hole cut into the mat

keep those teabags

I love browsing the tea bag art I find on Pinterest, and have long fantasized about repurposing used teabags for etegami use. We etegami artists often play around with whatever paper product is at hand when inspiration strikes --- coffee filters, paper dinner napkins, paper cups, etc (as long as it's mailable)--- so why not used teabags?

But what I really like about used teabags is the tea stains on the paper. I haven't gotten as far as actually painting on teabags, but for some time now, I have been emptying out the used leaves, then drying, cutting, and flattening the bags for future use. My first experiment has been to recycle old etegami by pasting them over with these small sheets of tea-stained teabags . It gives them a vintage-style look, don't you think? Well, maybe not, but this is just the beginning, so bear with me. If you are already into teabag art, I'd love to know what you are creating.

The stained fold-lines of the teabags makes this look like a window frame.

The hawk is my husband's first attempt at etegami! I added the words and the teabags.

 

more candy box mailart

When my husband thinks that I need cheering up, he gets me a box of these chocolates. They're cheap,  readily available at super markets and convenience stores, and they are delicious! One of the fun things about this brand is that they change their box designs frequently to celebrate the changing season or new flavors-- some of them limited-time-only flavors.

Another reason I like this brand is because of the way the box is constructed. You open it by pulling back the right edge of the box, and it can be re-closed. The bite-sized pieces of chocolate sit on a small, stiff-paper tray that can be pulled out and pushed back in. Even empty, the box is stiff enough to survive being sent through the postal system in an envelope. It is perfect material for mail art.

I filled this one with bees printed from an original etegami. I inscribed one of my favorite bee-related quotes on the inside of the flap (not visible in the photos), and glued a playful warning onto the front of the box. I gave the tray of bees a three-dimensional effect by mixing flat images and images glued onto corrugated cardboard.

The box, the printer paper, and the corrugated cardboard are all previously used materials that are reused for this purpose. I make them in English and in Japanese with lots of different themes, and may even get brave enough to make them in other languages someday for my international mail art friends.

more scrappy valentine cards

I thought I was finished with Valentine cards for this year, but I learned a lovely new poem about the heart and decided I couldn't go on to any new projects until I had expressed this short poem in etegami form. The poem is by Juukichi Yagi (1898 -1927), and it basically repeats two lines that translate roughly to: "Dear heart, go out into the world. But come back someday because this is the best place to be."

I chose the image of a heart traveling on a cloud (the Japanese version of a flying carpet), and followed the same steps described in my previous post: Scrappy Valentine Cards.  But while I was doing this, I started thinking about clouds in general, and how they are used in English expressions. And I started wondering: What does the expression "cloud nine" mean? And where did it come from? (google it yourself) This led to the English version of the scrappy etegami in the photo above.

glued scrap fabric onto one side of a card

painted clouds on washi cards with sumi ink, cut hearts from chiyogami

added words and name seal

glued scrap sheet magnets to back of each card

the result: refrigerator magnets!

scrappy valentine cards

I made these valentine cards from scraps that were destined for the trash: (1)  stiff paper board from a pack of printer paper, (2) an old blouse, (3) chiyogami (brightly patterned washi paper) left over from another project,  and (4) printed flexible magnets advertising a plumbing company.

I cut the stiff paper board into  2" x 3" cards, glued the fabric onto one side of each card,  cut hearts out of the chiyogami and glued them onto the fabric, then trimmed any cloth or chiyogami that extended beyond the edges of each card. I wrote the words directly on the fabric with a white gel pen.

Finally, I cut up the flexible magnets and glued them onto the back of each card so that the printed side was hidden and the black, magnetic side faced outwards. Hopefully the glue will be strong enough to keep the materials together even after lots of handling. I tested the strength of the completed magnet cards on my refrigerator and they didn't disappoint me. Magnetic Valentine cards made from recycled scraps!

candy box mailart

What would you do if your sweet or savory snacks came in small, colorful, artsy paper boxes like these? Would you eat the treats inside and throw out the box? Of course not!

You could display them on your bookshelf, or make practical use of them for collecting loose buttons and paper clips. But I like to turn them into mail art.

Notice the little purple box (6.5 cm x 4.5 cm; 1 3/4" x 2 1/2 "). It once contained a soft chewy sweet made from purple yams, and it has an etegami-style illustration of purple yams on the cover.

I converted it into a pop-up Valentine box card by recycling old Christmas cards to decorate the inside. I used a snowflake hole puncher to make holes in the black backside of one Christmas card, and cut the pink hearts out by hand from the colorful front side of another. It still needs words, which I'll add before I send it.



You've probably done something like this before. Maybe you'd like to do an exchange?

storm in my soul

One of my groups on RedBubble has launched a challenge to put an image to the lyrics of a Kenny Chesney song called “Spirit Of A Storm.”

I'd never heard of Kenny Chesney, but I didn't need to read past the first line of the song to see the picture in my mind. I decided to re-use part of an etegami I had painted a couple years ago for my series on the East Japan Earthquake/Tsunami of March 11, 2011. I cut out the mountain and waves from the original etegami, and glued it onto another card decorated with hand-torn colored wispy washi paper to express clouds and blood-red lightning.

Part of me feels bad for ruining the original etegami (it quoted from a cool poem by Robert Frost); but mostly I was curious whether it could be re-born as part of another image. The color combination grates on my nerves, and I'm not really pleased with the results. This agitation has produced a storm in my soul. Considering the theme of the challenge, does that make it a success?

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....