Unsent Letters

Last Saturday I joined the Together we are Stronger live stream hop again, this time spending two hours of crafting and chatting with my friend Christiana (@fraulinaxoxo on Instagram). When we decided to do the stream together we thought it would be nice to have a theme and, while checking options, found out that Jan 23rd is handwriting day and so the topic was settled!

Two days later I woke up with a song in my head, or more accurately a line from a song: “Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send”, and an idea for my project started to formulate.

An old box, filled with letters that were never sent. Love letters? Letters of anger or resntment? Of longing? I leave that to your imagination. I added some photos and trinkets to build up the story of our box owner, you know I love a good story :)

Here’s a quick video going through the box:

You can see most of the making process in the live stream replay here:

I love how unassuming the box looks when closed. It’s a pretty box, sure, but on first glance it’s just… well, a box. I resisted adding more embellishments to the cover because it didn’t really fit with the concept. If these are unsent letters, you’re not going to show them to anyone, and the trinkets may be souvenirs of things you don’t want to reflect on, but also not quite forget.

I started with a kraft box, adding texture with a handwriting stencil and Nuvo glacier paste, then covered it with pieces of Distress Collage Paper, purposely creating wrinkles for an extra worn look. When it was dry, I used another handwriting stencil with black tinted texture paste and dry brushed white paint to bring out the crinkles.

I added some patterned paper inside, which I later stained with Distress Oxide Sprays to create water damage effect (I seriously love these stains 🤎). While doing this, as the box was quite damp, I could form it a bit, giving it an uneven shape and ‘cracks’.

While working on the box I also started making the ‘treasure’. In the live you can see me playing with the now classic technique of ironing Distress Inked paper that was shared many times by Tim Holtz. Basicaly, you wrinkle the paper and ink the creases, then spray the paper with water and immediately iron it. The hot iron basically bakes the ink into the paper with the wrinkled pattern, so you get a distressed looking page that you can still stamp on quite easily. Which is what I did next - using some handwriting background stamps, I stamped to the ironed papers to get the look of a VERY worn letter. I did add some stains and inked the edges later, but the ironing technique already created the old papers look I wanted.

The other bits added to the box include found items like a piece of broken shell, an acorn (just the base), a broken old pin (it belonged to my grandmother), some vintage tickets and a feather kept in a glass vial. The poststamps you see in the photos are all handmade with stamps, it’s pretty amazing how real they look. I also made a ‘newspaper clip’ by combining some of my stamps, and a pressed flower specimen tag like the ones I made for the naturalist journal project a while back. The photos are all from Tim Holtz’s Idea-ology line, I just cut their edges using his deckle trimmer for that extra vintage vibe inked them a bit.

I really love how this project came out, I love the idea of it and how it all came out of a line from a song. The song, by the way, is “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues. When I was a kid, my mom had a cassette tape of this album and it was one of my favorites. I must have heard it dozens of times, and the lyrics just entered that pool in my memory where things mix and float in the most unexpected times. I still love that album, I got it on a CD some years back and now it’s also on my Spotify list. Kinda cool to think of all the different technologies I heard it on :)

Till next time,

xx

Naama