I’ve mentioned before that all the children in our lives live far away. My family moved away from our extended family when I was four, so I know how it feels when a relative sent me something in the mail. Mostly I received birthday cards from my grandmothers, with a bit on money tucked inside, but I distinctly remember the year that my father’s mother mailed us each a valentine. I thought that was pretty cool.
Anyway, I try to send our nieces and nephew and my cousin’s children some snail-mail to commemorate various holidays, if only to let them know that we are thinking of them with love.
So for this Valentine mailing, I sent them some cards from this neat reproduction Valentine book that I picked up on ebay a few years ago. It was published by Golden Books in 2006 and is filled with charming copies of valentines from years gone by. Being a keen vintage paper collector, I was happy to find this book so I could send something with a vintage look, but not have to part with any of my original cards. In fact, I have some of the cut-and-paste envelopes that are reproduced in this book, in their true original form.
I won’t show you any of the actual valentines in the book because I’m planning a post for next week showing you some of my favourites of the real vintage ones I have, and I don’t want to overload you with images of valentines! But um, ok, I will show you this one, because it is so darned cute.
One part of the vintage valentines that I particularly find charming are the little stamps they used to provide, that children would cut out and glue to envelopes that they would be hand delivering. So I made my own reproduction of some by scanning some from an original vintage sheet and printing them up.
Since I would be mailing to households that included more than one child, I personalized the valentine for each of them by including a small hand-written note and putting them into a small envelope. I made the envelopes by completely opening up an old used one I had, and then tracing it onto a sheet of paper. I then cut them out, scored the fold lines and folded. I didn’t go so far as to glue them, rather using a sticker to seal them shut.
I like this heart-strewn notepad as it will be handy for leaving little love-notes around the house too!
And since I think it’s better for such things to arrive before the holiday rather than after. I popped out in the massive snow storm to mail them on Friday. Here is a shot of the storm when it was only about half way through. I’m not a huge fan of winter but one thing I do like doing is going out during snow storms. It is like you’re on a different planet. Mind you, I certainly would never be walking along in it bare headed like this lady was. I can’t help but wonder why she didn’t pull that warm looking hood up.
Thank you for visiting. I hope you’re having a great Sunday.
loulou
