Moving Day and Blank Vintage Postcards

Once again I'm moving from apartment to apartment. It seems I can't stay anywhere longer than two years. But here are a few things that have come out of my semimigratory condition.

I now have a full list of everywhere I've lived since 1996, when I moved from St. Cloud State Unversity campus to Minneapolis. This is important because occasionally some stupid insurance form or credit card or whatever else needs an excruciatingly complete background of all the places I've lived. In the course of moving I tend to discover heaps of paper that have not been touched in years, and these may include junk mail or official mail that it turns out I don't need to save. On these, of course, are all my old addresses, so in the last three or four pages of my Moleskine address book I have recorded all of my past addresses in chronological order, for my own reference. This has proven to be handy on several occasions.

As well, among the long-neglected property I'm turning up are boxes and envelopes of antique documentation and photos. These are material my mother asked if I would scan and preserve digitally, as once upon a time I attempted to break into genealogy and that's who she thinks I am now (which is cool, because now I have a lot of military certificates from the Civil War). Also, I salvaged a box of old photos my wife's family was going to throw away, when we moved her parents out of their Wisconsin home and emptied the house for resale. In this lot I'm finding amazing old photographs of Russian and Polish immigrants, mounted on dense cardboard or particle board squares. I can't understand how her family would be so cavalier about these treasures!

This latter thing has turned into a small project, into which I've plunged all my energy as a time-killer and a distraction from packing. I'm terrible, but at the same time, observe: blank postcard backs. Through the miracle of Picasa I've digitally removed any writing and produced an empty postcard, upon which anyone who cares to may write over through their own graphics program, for purposes of novelty over social media. I'm not explaining myself very well, so here: when you upload an image of writing to Twitter, you can use way more than 140 characters:

Scanning in vintage postcards means I get to screw around with new tweets/status updates, &c. pic.twitter.com/WQncqWk4eM
— Christian Wilkie (@CWWilkie) May 11, 2014

 Alton Brown turned to this format when fans criticized his typos, and he instead hand-wrote notes on Post-Its®.

So if you'd like, here are five blank postcard backs from vintage postcards, from (as far as I can tell) three different nations. Fun, eh? I hope so.

The Quick-and-Dirty Short Fiction

I have a humble formula for generating short stories. It's a little simplistic, but when I'm absolutely scraping for ideas, a big, elaborate convolution of high concepts won't help me. I just need a quick-and-dirty checklist for a basic short story, just to get something written. Later, when I'm convinced of its brilliance, then I can worry about the complicated matters.

First, pick a conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Circumstance, or Man vs. Self. I know there are over thirty tropes, but these three will suffice. Next, I write a little column of three abbreviations...

Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!

More plundering of the in-laws' house has turned up this gem:

Amazingly, it fell out of a book I had intended to read. No sooner did I open the hard cover than it came sliding out, into my palm. On the back is stamped: "© 1970 KELLOGG CO." and it feels like it's made of a very soft plastic. Not quite rubber and not dissimilar to today's silicon products, it's at once sturdy and flexible.

This thing was manufactured the year I was born! (And yes, my 40th birthday's coming up and I'm pretty displeased about that.) Look at the difference between the toy surprise of yesteryear and the crap we get today. Four decades ago, a kids' cereal company thought nothing of crafting a complex stencil of its own breakfast mascots for the entertainment of children! Today, you get some doodle on a piece of cardboard or an injection-molded animal on wheels that don't work. (And let's not even bring Cracker Jack's inglorious fall into this.)

This stencil, being made the year of my birth and having survived twoscore years intact--indeed, nigh-pristine--I had no other choice than to mark an impression with the stencil onto paper. I found a nice, dark gel pen and tried to put it into the first sluice of Crackle's hat... and was blocked. The slits were far too narrow for a pen. I selected a long, thin pencil with a very slender tip and discovered this, too, was still too thick for the stencil. Any child who first attempted to utilize this "toy" doubtlessly met with the same mounting frustration and irritation I began to experience.

However, I have an unreasonable and desultory collection of writing implements. It was no effort to find a mechanical pencil and extend the lead too far for writing but just perfect for this stencil. When I completed Crackle's head, however, I decided this was too demanding an effort with too little kickback to merit completing the trio. Making sure every last tiny space and dot was filled up was tedious, and compressing the stencil rigidly in place with my other hand developed a burning cramp in my forearm. In the end I had a seat on the porch--our weather is currently lovely--and discovered the necessity for more than adequate lighting for this activity: many of the slits are so small and thin they cannot be detected in light any degree of dim.

My cat hopped up into the chair beside me and kept me company while I traced out these three friends. I heard an anecdote that these elfin figures represented three Depression-era immigrant groups, revealed by their costumes: Snap was some form of Scand (my memory is leaky on this point, and what nation wears both chef's hats and neckerchiefs?), Crackle was French, and Pop was German. However, I was completely unable to find anything to corroborate this theory online, the past having been rewritten. Anyway, ten minutes later I had my tableau.

It seems that the succession of faces degenerated, purely the fault of the stencil. I had some fun coloring in Crackle's hat, but coloring in Pop's entire eye made me wonder what had gone wrong. Perhaps nothing is meant to be colored in by the pencil: you simply trace the outline and then color it in? That sounds reasonable, though those lines are so freakin' thin, there's very little coloring to be done.

And, of course, they look nothing like their contemporary interpretation:

Envelope Assembly

I've had reason, recently, to get back into making envelopes. I'm quite pleased to do so: I have a number of pen pals--some of whom are feeling quite neglected lately and so I thought I'd produce something a little special to begin to make up for my inattention.

Several years ago I picked up a packet of envelope templates from a local store, Lunalux, who in turn informed me they were made by another local crafts-person. I won't expound upon the potential environmental benefit yielded by purchasing locally produced craft supplies, but I was pleased to be part of an insular crafts-sphere, of sorts. The envelopes I made from these templates were so admired by one of my pen pals, a DJ in Madison, that she requested a kit of her own, which request I fulfilled.

The templates come in many sizes for different functions. Many are suitable for posting in the mail and may handily travel around the world, depending on the quality of paper you use. Others are a little more intricate or awkwardly sized for postal mail and would better accompany a gift or else might be handed off in person. I prefer those envelopes which lend themselves to being mailed, and I'm careful to outfit them for optimal postal travel: stout paper, all flaps and corners sealed flat, judicious application of stickers, &c.

These pictures are of my personal favorite template, a capacious accordion-sided envelope. I love it because it looks fairly elaborate, hearkens to the classic accordion folder, and permits quite a bit of storage. Also, as pictured, the broad front has enough room for these particular Red Horseshoe address labels as well as postage--not every envelope can say that, not until you start talking to large business envelopes. (Note: lovely though the labels are, their adhesive gum is weak and useless on its own; with the application of Elmer's glue stick, however, it becomes a sovereign bond.)

With this iteration, just as a little quelque chose, I tried out a manual airbrush/paint spatter, I guess you'd call it. It's a simple little device, basically a long, thin metal tube you dip into ink or thin paint/dye, then blow in the other end to spray it upon your paper/canvas/surface. I've never used it before but bought it several years ago with the desire to practice at it. Now I've finally used it and I'm not sure what caused the large globs of ink (I had the foresight to choose a grey ink rather than something darker and less forgiving), whether a finer spray might be achieved with a thicker--or thinner--liquid or whether I'm just doing it wrong, somehow.

So, there we are. I've made four of these bad boys: one will stay in Minneapolis, one will fly out to Turkey, and the other two? I'm not sure now what will happen to them, where they will end up.

Wrapped in Culture

This will look odd, but it's better than me linking to a Word document for you to download.

What I did here was take a section of the ancient tale Beowulf, render it with a font (originally Calligrapher but, here, Calligula), fade it to a pale grey, and... I can only guess what this must've been for. Perhaps I canted it at an angle and carved envelope liner out of it--that certainly would have been a suitably creative project I'd've undertaken in my heyday. Unlikely that it would have formed the envelope itself, being that space is so limited in 8.5"x11" paper. If I could've brought this to wherever I was working at the time and printed it out at 11"x17", sure, then I could've done something. Third guess: maybe the background for address labels. Again, tilt them at an artistic angle, cut them up, and write something in bold black ink across the faded grey print.

The idea here was to impart the feeling of literary tradition, hearkening to a seminal piece of work, just as one would use photos of cemeteries to evoke somber feelings or a sense of horror. Lacking suitable materials, I have never been one to give up a project when I might craft the materials for myself. I think the only drawback to this particular project was that the laser printer ink tended to smear or blur in the process: I remember being dissatisfied with the result.

Oh well, caveat emptor.

Creating Envelopes

These are some envelopes I made once. I picked up an envelope template kit at Lunalux, bought rolls and large sheets of patterned paper everywhere (Paper Source, CorAzoN, PaperGami), and cut out my own envelopes.

The templates were of a variety of styles, from long, slim envelopes you might use at formal parties to accordion-edged mailers that held quite a lot of inserts. One friend in particular, in Madison, WI, received the bulk of my creations. I never found a reliable way to seal them: glue stick tended not to bond well with certain weights of paper, and sometimes my envelopes would fall asunder in the middle of being processed. Sometimes the contents were returned to me, sometimes to the destination, but mostly they were simply lost/destroyed. I would recommend that people start using letterhead: even if your envelope is destroyed in processing, the Post Office can still return your letter to you.

I especially liked this pattern of paper because of how exotic it looked. I tried to efficiently cut one envelope next to another, so as to maximize the usage of this lovely paper, but sometimes I was tempted to place one of the large red designs in a key location on the envelope. I had suitable decorated tissue paper to line the inside, though that was redundant: the paper was impossible to read through as it was. Patterned paper like this also necessitated a nice clear mailing label on the front, of course, a small sacrifice of design for the sake of practicality.