naomi loves: snail mail

snail mail

A week of creative snail-mail: 10 mail-art parcels

Each of these brown-paper packages was no bigger than a greeting card, but I made the mistake of filling them with a few too many things, making them a few too many millimetres too fat. Four millimetres, in fact, less than half a centimetre, but that was all the difference it took to kick each…

Ok I’m actually really proud of this idea. In this Snail Mail My Email request, the writer only asked for “mail art,” without specifying anything in particular. In her letter she made a cute little Christmas wish-list, which included among other things a blue typewriter and another cat (or three or five). So I painted…

On Day 3 of my Snail Mail My Email challenge, the letter I was asked to write and send was particularly touching. I don’t know who Keir and his Dad are. Maybe Keir is away at university (I know Americans call university “school”) but, to my mind, the letter read as though Keir was younger….

The next email I received for Snail Mail My Email (I wrote about it here and the official website is here) included a letter and a doodle request that made me laugh out loud: “Doodle of Bruce from Matilda eating chocolate cake.” So that’s what I drew on the envelope and, for good measure, I…

I’ve just finished a week of Snail Mail My Email, during which I pledged to write “creative mail” on behalf of strangers, using copy sent to me via email. This was the first letter I wrote. The note itself was very short, and the “doodle request” was for a snowflake. I decided to fold up…

[c Some outgoing Halloween-themed mail-art from this week…

It is an odd thing to do, I know. But in case you’re thinking I’m a bit strange (you wouldn’t be alone) and you wonder why I spend so much of my time writing letters to people I’ve never met, here’s a tiny sample of what greets me in my own letterbox, on a regular…

When was the last time you received an email? How did it make you feel? When was the last time you received a handwritten letter in the mail? How did that make you feel? Once upon a time, an artist and filmmaker named Ivan Cash took to the streets asking strangers those very questions, and…

“I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.” David Nicholls (author & screenwriter)

Look what arrived in the mail for Scout and Ralph last week! The tiniest envelope you’ve ever seen, complete with a minuscule stamp (of a snail, because snail-mail, natch), and an adorable wax seal. Inside was a teeny tiny card, with a letter to the children written inside. The letter was from the Elves and Fairies, who confessed…

A little while back I painted a series of five geometric water-colour paintings. They are patchworks of triangles, really. For me, they are interpretations of what it is like to look through thick, antique diamond-paned glass windows, while it is raining. Recently I had them printed as postcards, so that I could have something colourful…

The “mysterious letters” project is as quirky as it is lovely, and probably impossible, but nevertheless delightful. Artists and writers Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe have set themselves the task of writing a letter to every household in the world. Yes, EVERY household. Don’t think too hard about it, because once you do you’ll be…