We recently received a cute handmade card and note in the mail from our 8 year old niece who lives far away. I know from firsthand experience of growing up far away from any extended family, that an envelope addressed straight to her would be most appreciated in return. I also thought a girl of her age would enjoy getting a little notebook with a secret letter slipped within its pages.
Since it is also near to Valentine’s Day I went with that theme, using a pre-made card with a heart motif on it. It isn’t strictly a Valentine card as it has no writing on it and came from a box of them that I bought years ago and have used for birthdays and other occasions too, so really any note card would work for this project.
The pages are plain lined paper from an 8×10 inch pad that I cut to make 8 folded pages (so 16 in total), and the binding was done with 3 of the 6 threads from regular cotton embroidery floss.
I’ve made similar notebooks before and posted some detailed instructions for this method of tying the pages to the cover with an ancient bookmaking technique called Coptic Binding – here.
I also made use of my new awl to pre-make the holes through which I passed the floss but as I showed in the previous tutorial, a pushpin and small hammer do the job fine as well.
For the note that I slipped inside, I used a template made by tracing a small envelope I received with a flower delivery that I had opened at the seams, and wrote my message directly on that and then folded it up and sealed it. The ‘stamp’ is a scan and printout of some vintage stamps I have from the 1940s or so, previously shown in this post from last year.
I think this will be a nice surprise for this darling girl to get in the mail. I’m glad that she is showing signs of interest in having a pen-pal living in Toronto and am certainly keen to encourage that by sending interesting letters in response.
[For information purposes, I took the envelope to be weighed at the Post Office to see if it went as a regular letter (in case it was too heavy with the extra pages) and it did so I didn’t have to add any extra postage to this, at least in Canada, that is.]
Also in last week’s outgoing mail were a couple of vintage Valentines for my cousin’s sweet kids, one of whom is seen here posing with the blanket I made her for Christmas.
Thanks for taking a look. I hope your week is off to a great start with a fine Monday.
xo loulou
