During this 2020 pandemic, we attempt to save the USPS from shutting down across the country. Even with the luxury of our inboxes stuffed with marketing promos, bills, and non-sensical meetings, we hold dear our national treasure of the slowly forgotten snail mail. Especially when the threat of voting is for the sake of keeping a lunatic at the helm of his presidency.

I never thought I’d have a pen pal past 3rd grade.

When we had to start passing comprehension tests for reading short stories and learn all about homophones, our teachers thought it would be great us as students across classrooms in another school.

I got matched with Choi, who was a singular Chinese student in her class much like me. We wrote in pencil on lined, loose-leaf paper, talked about our families and what our favorite subjects were in school, and exchanged our school portraits once! I could remember the excitement of the days when the mail arrived and we cracked open our decorated letters.

Writing is cathartic, especially by hand.

As an adult, the only time I really get to showcase my handwriting is on special holiday cards given to friends and family. It’s often an unrequited gesture that gets me excited about the end-of-year season and gives me to chance to reflect on my relationship with each person. It made distance connections with others come a little closer together again.

I scrolled through Instagram one day and when a long-time colleague from undergrad campaigned to start a pen-pal exchange to help support the USPS, I jumped at the chance to do it. I was excited by the old rush of letter exchange.

Decorating letters is even more fun.

Let me say that when my first letter arrived from Bo, she set the bar high. Colored envelope, specialty pen ink, bubble letter typography, custom stationery, and a note written from front to back got me super excited. It was going to bring out the best in our graphic design and creative efforts.

A competitive touch came out of me. I came back with Hello Kitty stationery, a kraft envelope with Japanese characters, and sealed it off with washi tape of all the animals in the Chinese zodiac. It was a blast spending the whole two hours deciding what to put together.

It was my turn to volley again and wanted to turn it up a notch. In the earlier weeks of the pandemic, I cleaned out my craft supplies and hesitated to toss out my heat embossing supplies. I hadn’t used them in forever for a senior year project, so it was time to make use of it.

I picked up these rubber stamps with basic geometric shapes at the Paper Source, nicer stationery paper, and envelopes, a wet ink pad, and still had plenty of embossing powder to go around. Within minutes, I had a special item worthy of imparting my handwriting on as my wow factor for this round. I’m so stoked to feel the reaction from afar.

The results are worth the powder mess everywhere.

Musings

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Design Your Own Stationery with Stamps and Embossing Powder