Philpott Lake

Diana found a stash of quite ugly postcards of Philpott Lake.

Sent in this great envelope, with instructions to alter and return.

Goodbye, ugly tree stump, hello, ugly green monster.

Sent back in envelope 660 - now this is what a lake should look like.

You should be able to see more of these altered postcards here.

Bonus mail sent

Sometimes even I send bonus mail out to people in the MMSA swaps. Some of my recent 'altered' postcards arrived sans quotation. I know this is part and parcel of sending mail art out into the world to fend for itself, but it was good to hear about mishaps, and send out 'replacements'. Or maybe they should be consolation prizes?

Two bonus altered postcards:

MMSA arrivals 2

The last 3 altered cards arrived.

Here are the last 5 I sent, all linked from Karen's website...

And here are 3 I received...

...from Joyce and Lynn...

...and from Laura.

MMSA altered - arrivals 1

In addition to the cut postcards, I also sent out some more that were postcards (bought in the early 90s) altered with text from a 2014 someecards daily calendar.

Here are 5 of them, all linked from Karen's website as I neglected to scan them prior to departure:

And here are 9 I received:

from PostMuse and Currie

from Kaprice and Laurie 

from Cathy, Care and Carla

Margaret and Karen

Sadly, the last one was missing its star player. Here's the scan from Karen's website:

I guess Mr Frog went on a new adventure...

...at least one of the cards I sent suffered the same fate - card arrived without its accompanying text. I can report that 3 of the 4 fish attached to the back of one of my cut postcards made it.

MMSA altered postcards - Escher 3

I forgot to scan the 3rd Escher card I cut pieces out of. This scan is from Karen's blog. You can make out the 4 cut shapes on the left of the image.

I cut 2 black and 2 white fish out, then stuck them on the back. We'll see how well they travel through the mail - based on the extracted teeth I sent to Christophe I'd say larger pieces travel better than smaller ones.

MMSA altered postcards - Escher 2

Continuing with cutting pieces of the postcards away, but this time saving them to stick on the address side.

This one is Escher's Sun and Moon. The blue is just for contrast.

MMSA Altered Postcards - Escher 1

I've been creating postcards for the Mail Me Some Art challenges. Up until now I've been designing in photoshop and printing the postcards using my desktop printer.

This challenge is to alter postcards in some way - add something, cut something away etc. Initially I had no plans to enter this one, then half-remembered that I had some postcards stashed away in the basement that I bought in the late 80s/early 90s.

This is one where I cut some parts away from a postcard featuring Escher's Grass Snakes.

Early stages:

Rear view:

With different colored paper behind the card:

I'll be interested to see how these cards travel through the mail.

St Valentine's Day final part - altered Smash

Smash often sends her envelopes marked 'not to open', meaning they have nothing inside for the recipient to read. This one said 'open' - inside was a description of the paper - a chemically altered  page from National Geographic.

The stamp and writing are perfectly matched to the mysterious paper.