I have to admit, it wasn’t until after last week’s Letter Writing Summer Social here at The Paper Place (man, what a party!) that I found myself  really interested in incorporating stationery and writing long-hand letters into my everyday life. I mean, I always thought it would be nice to take some time and hand-write a letter to my best friend on the other side of the world (instead of  firing off an email), though I never seemed to find the time. But, watching everyone decorating envelopes and composing beautiful letters to friends and family made me lament my exclusive email and text message habits. After recovering from Thursday’s party, I took some time to make my own stationery. I revisited some letters my girlfriend and I exchanged years ago and saw that what we mostly wrote to each other about were the books we were reading, going so far as to include lengthy excerpts from whatever novel or poetry collection was inspiring us at the time. With that in mind, I decided to take apart some previously loved books and transform the pages into letter-writing paper and envelope liners.

I used the Paper Source Envelope Liner template to create liners for 4-bar sized envelopes (in Gravel). The clear template makes it easy to position your liner exactly where you want it on the page, so I was able to maximize the amount of text that would be visible in my envelope.

For the actual sheets of letter writing paper, I quickly thumbed through my book and tore out the pages that had the least amount of text on them (chapter headings and title pages work exceptionally well). I have to warn you though, this step is not for the faint of heart – resign yourself to the fact that you’ll never read this book ever again before you proceed! After tearing out about a dozen pages, I cut them down to 5×7 sheets.

I made sure that one side of the sheet was almost entirely blank  with just a bit of text at the top – without any other context, a simple line of text can be very poetic, mysterious, or just plain strange! The other side of the sheet is covered in text – I like the idea of my friend being able to read random excerpts from the novel when she`s done with my letter.

While Letter Writing Month might officially be over, I`m only just getting started and I hope you`ve found enough inspiration here throughout July to keep it going all-year-round!

- Kalpna