Letterboxing: a new activity, oh my!

My friend Kristen has been doing this for awhile and last night she took me out to try it. And it's just as wonderful as it sounded!

Letterboxing is basically a treasure hunt where you follow clues (on a centralized letterboxing website) to find a box hidden somewhere, in cities, parks, wherever. In the box is a hand-carved rubber stamp, usually with an image that represents the place where it's hidden, or sometimes representing the person who made it.

In the box is also a little blank book (often handmade also) which is a record of everyone who has found the box. You stamp your own personal carved stamp in it and put the date you were there and your name. When you find the box, you get to see all these amazing stamps from all the people who have been there, with the dates they were there and their name. You take the stamp in the box and stamp it into your own little book where you collect all the stamps from the boxes you've found as your record. awesome! Kristen says letterboxing has been around since the 1800s, when they used to hand carve stamps and hide them, and clues

Then you go to the letterboxing community website and log your finds, print out clues to lead you to more, etc.

One etiquette item about letterboxing is to never show photos of the stamps you find or basically what's in the boxes you find - so as not to spoil the surprise for everyone that goes looking for it after you. So, here are photos of our adventures last night finding three boxes around central Austin. See the rest of the photos at my flickr page.

These are the stamps I brought along to stamp into the books. Some of the boxes and therefore the books are so tiny that the big Niku stamp didn't fit. I'm going to design and carve a new stamp to go along with my "trail name", Niku Sweet Tooth :) and the little book I brought to put the letterbox stamps into.

what the heck is the Lovely Letterbox?

I've mentioned the Lovely Letterbox here and there in a few places and wanted to let you all know exactly what it is, especially because it is one of my very favorite projects!

The Lovely Letterbox is basically a subscription service. I adore subscriptions, because I love mail, and love knowing I'm going to be getting mail. The idea of being able to send a package out each month containing whatever I was inspired to create or share that month really appealed to me. There are 11 participants in the first round who receive something in the mail at least once a month for 6 months. When I started it, I only knew that participants would receive original zines, zines from my personal collection (which is kind of monstrous and I'm trying to cut it down), crafts made by me, samples from new things I'm trying out, and craft/mail/ephemera supplies from my always growing collection of supplies.

We are two months in and even after two installments, I still can't say what all the future ones will include. I can share with you what I've done so far. I wanted to make this a special exclusive opportunity for the people who signed up, so I'm creating zines especially for it that won't be available until after their subscription is over, possibly offered in a pack or something like that.

I already know I'm going to continue this project when this round is finished because it has been a great success, which to me means that the participants have given me lots of positive feedback about being part of it. So if you would like to be on a waiting list for the next round, e-mail me and I'll get in touch a month or two before this round ends and the new one begins and give you the chance to sign up before I post about it here and open it up to first come first serve sign ups.

Three of my lovely participants have great craft blogs and have each done posts about Lovely Letterbox and you should check out their wonderful blogs anyway:
Average Jane Crafter, Craftypod, and PonyBoy Press

July was the first month and I made quilted fabric postcards for the very first piece of mail. I was already working on the goodies for the packages and carved stamps for everyone in the shape of the state they live in with a little envelope in the middle. I stamped this on each of their postcards as a little intrigue.

For the first package, I made a stencil and spray painted it onto their envelopes. In the package was: the hand carved stamps, a few zines each from my collection, a full color collage zine that I made at the Austin Book Workers book fair, some note paper that I stamped with various other stamps I've carved, some cute japanese note papers, and little punched out shapes I punched from patterned paper with a postage stamp shape punch and a scalloped circle punch.

For the August installment, I was really into the idea of a kit of some kind. I made kits for little plush teeth (my favorite plushy to make) with a tiny how-to zine in it, copies of the zine I made for the 24 Hour Zine challenge, pieces of this great screen normally used for screen doors/window screens that I used to make a mixed media collage piece in an art show, a letter about what inspired me in this installment and things going on in my life, some cool fibers, little sewn collage houses from the previously mentioned art show, and sets of sew on buttons.