I'm off to the post office in a moment to mail a package for Me Darlin' Mither.
It's a box full of happy things (one of my girls, some tiny baby birdies, paper bunnies, and paper dolls).
One musn't slap a plain label on such a box.
I gussied mine up with an old favorite paper-cutting craft.
I love this one because it's more free-form than most of the others I do.
No patterns to trace.
No exacting work with the scissors.
Here are the materials I used today:
Yes, that's the inside of a security envelope.
And, yes, that cell phone user's guide plays an important role.
Here's a step-by-step:
Using the Sharpie marker, draw some birdie bodies (say that three times really fast) on the papers of your choice, and leave a little paper showing outside the marker lines when you cut them out.
Draw and cut a few beaks and feathers in the same way.
Rethink your junk mail, catalogs and magazines.
You can use all kinds of paper.
I didn't take any photographs of this step, but you should draw and cut some eyes, too.
No blind birds, please.
Now you play around until you've designed some birdies.
We have here a Robin Recycle bird and a Red-feathered Gwen Wren (endangered species).
Now it's time for the (defunct) cell phone user's guide to play it's part.
We've got to apply a little glue to all these birdie parts to hold our feathered friends together.
And we certainly don't want our workdesk all gummed up and sticky, now do we?
So we open our cell phone user's guide (or any other pamphlet or catalog we don't need anymore) and we use it for our gluing surface.
After we've messed up a page with glue, we simply use the glue stick to turn to a fresh page, ...
...park our glue stick upside down to keep it from drying out, and we have a nice clean page waiting for our next piece.
Ain't it wunnerful?
It made Robin happy.
Pretty soon you'll have a pile of little birdies (or flowers, or butterflies, or...) right there in front of you.
You can keep them in an envelope or a file, and the next time you have some snail mail going out, you can just glue them on the box or envelope, and use your Sharpie to draw on some legs (or antennae, or...).
And off you go to the post office.
Where you pay someone a very small sum of money to carry your package or letter all the way across the country for you.
It's still a pretty good deal.