Postcard; Green band

This one took less than a month to find its way back.  It's one we left in Sacramento in March.  The little boys and I spent a couple of mornings making cards while we were there.  I'd picked up a couple of Pilot parallel pens (something I've wanted to try forever) and it made calligraphy-on-the-go a much more feasible option.

The green band on this card started out as lettering with some Celtic illumination for St Patrick's Day.  But I had limited coloring tools and I didn't love the effect using just what I had, so I added a long curve and made a band out of it.

This was returned without a note.  Thanks to the finder, though!

Postcard: Poppy and serendipity

We (the Dad, the boyos, and I) spent last week in Sacramento.  The Dad had meetings and work, while the boys and I explored the wet city from underneath brand-new umbrellas.  We put tokens into the Art-o-Mat at the Crocker, ate really good ramen, explored Old Sac, saw Sutter's Fort and the Indian Museum, and of course visited the library! The Dad even got to join us for an evening hike at the Effie Yeaw nature preserve, which is breathtakingly beautiful in spring.  We saw wood ducks, mallards, and both great egrets and snowy egrets. The great egrets stood like stately statues, while the snowies would stand still for about ten seconds and then suddenly scramble and pounce through the shallows and stab their long beaks into the water.  When they popped back up, they looked confused and stunned.  Probably they were actually catching something small like snails, but to us they looked like awkward children trying and repeatedly failing to snatch some small, swift creature from the river.

While we were in Sacramento, this arrived at home--a postcard from another visit to the same city.

I think I've mentioned how terrible I am with watercolors.  I haven't a clue how to use them but I'm drawn to them anyway, especially on ephemeral projects like the postcards.  I figure I'd be excited to find a postcard in a library book no matter what the art looked like, and if it's poorly done then there's less temptation to keep it rather than dropping it in the mail. 

Keeping, of course, is always a possibility, but we're grateful for every finder who sends the cards back to us!  This one wrote simply:

GREETINGS FROM SACRAMENTO PUBLIC LIBRARY
828 I STREET
SACRAMENTO, CA 95814 

Thanks, finder, for returning it home!

Postcard: Bear, and a mystery half-solved! Maybe...

This beauty came back to us today after nearly two years!

It was placed in Portland in 2016.  When it arrived in the mail, it looked familiar--but I knew none of us had drawn it.  I remember a discussion about the bear, and I'm pretty sure other people had drawn bears in that same creative session--I vaguely remember someone not liking their bear.  It may even have been me.  But for the life of me I couldn't figure out whose art this was.  Even the signature didn't help.

And then it hit me!  We had a couple of LDS missionaries to dinner (as we often do), and invited them to draw postcards for an upcoming trip.  One of those young men turned out to be really artistic, and I'm pretty sure this is his work.  Just a quick little drawing, but so fun!  I wish my memory wasn't so spotty so I could give him a shoutout by name, but it's been a long time and I forget things easily.

Of course, it's possible that I'm mixing up two people, or that I'm otherwise mis-remembering.  The flower in particular gives me pause...such an unexpected detail for a young man to add...but I love how the bear seems to be gazing down at it.  (Especially since the artist managed to give that impression with two tiny dot-eyes.)

The finder writes:

Hi,
I found this postcard in the downtown Portland library, probably less than 6 months after you left it.  I just re-found it when I cleaned up some papers form a vacation--oops!  It was a fun thing to find and re-find, and I hope you enjoy getting it back!
Tracy Thomas
Portland OR
Thanks, Tracy, for playing along! 

Postcard: Lines

 It's been a while since we got a postcard, and this one sat on the table for a week before I realized it wasn't just a random colored-pencil test scrap or something of the boys'!

Jesse made this one.  Abstract lines of color.  I love how he teamed apple green with aqua blue, and red with purple.  It's probably one that he made at the end of an afternoon of postcard creation, when he was out of ideas but still didn't have the number of cards he had started out wanting to make.  

This was simply stamped "The Dalles-Wasco Co. Public Library" with a hand-drawn smiley face.

Thank you, finder, for returning it to us!

Postcard: Emacity

I love words. I had a big vocabulary as a child, and I loved learning new words. I still like coming across a word I don't know, though it doesn't happen often any more.  Or didn't, before the Internet.  Everything's easier to find than it was before the internet.  There have been whole websites devoted to underused words.  Save the Words was my favorite.  I was sad when it closed down.

Emacity is a great word.  I know quite a few people who have this quality.  Often, the emacitous are characterized as women, but the reality is men are just as vulnerable to a fondness for buying things.  They may just buy different things. 

I buy art supplies.  And beautiful paper.  What is your emacitous weakness?

The finder of this postcard writes:

Found! Inside a Nutcracker book at the San Francisco Main Library.  Dec 2017
Thank you, kind finder!  And what serendipity, that a postcard lost in September of 2016 was found in a Nutcracker book and returned to me at Christmastime, 2017!

Postcard: Wonderfulness

This one was very quick!  We were in Sacramento last week--and got our first Sacramento postcard back this week!  

I spent the week exploring solo, mostly (my husband was on business and busy during the day)--but I did have the chance to meet up with a friend I hadn't seen since 2014.  That 2014 meeting was our first, after meeting through the internet and the practice of mail art.  So it seemed wonderfully fitting that among the things we decided to do was to place the handmade cards I'd been creating in the evenings.  (We also went to the Crocker art museum, where I was delighted to find an Art-O-Mat!  After first hearing of them about 15 years ago, I was so excited to actually see one, to put my tokens in one of those refurbished 1970s cigarette machines and go home with tiny little pieces of art!)

This is the first Sacramento card that made it back; there are still 14 hidden somewhere in the library near Old Sac.

What tickled us about this card is that the finder added to the artwork on the front of the card, putting little hearts in each corner and extending the flourishes on the lettering with small dots!  Hm...maybe we should leave space on the front of some of our cards for artwork from the finders!

The finder wrote:
I found this great post card @ the down town Sacramento library.  My little girls go to a tweener book club there the last Thurs. of every month.  Their book selection this month was called Real Friends.  It's a graphic novel that helps tweeners navagate friendships.  Cheers!  Rebecca McDaniel

Boy...I remember those tween years and how fraught friendship was. I watched my own kids (well, four so far, two to go) go through it too, and most of them faced some struggles.  I looked up this book and now I need to see a copy in real life.  Graphic novels are cool--and this one is a memoir, which is even more intriguing. 

Thanks, Rebecca, for the return of our postcard and the book note!

Summer left our part of the world overnight.  Typically there's a good two weeks in which we run the air conditioning during the day and the heater at night and we just try not to think about the cost of cooling and then heating our house every 24 hours.  But this year, the temperatures dropped from the 90s to the 60s between a Monday and a Tuesday.

So when my husband and I visited Sacramento last week, we flew out on a chilly gray morning and arrived into a balmy, sunny midday.  While we were there, a postcard arrived back home with memories of our summer vacation and a warm message from the little family who had discovered it.

The finders wrote:
Our little family of 4 sat down as a family to read library books before bed.  Tonight we chose a "feel good" book called Thanks & Giving.  We opened the book & this card fell into our laps! Thanks for the smiles, joy, & excitement you contributed to our family tonight! 
The Stoddard family, Warrenton, Oregon 9/22/17

Stoddard family, thanks for sending it back!  We loved envisioning the scene you described.  The twins are 8 and they wondered how old your children are.  We also wondered if you might know the Moss family, whom we visited while on vacation! 

So much wonderful wondering! :)