In an age where most communication is digital and post is usually something you've ordered online, we love to encourage children (and their families) to feel the joy in sending a beautiful card or letter to someone. With Mail Art, it is made even more special by a beautifully crafted envelope that heralds this thing that was created just for you, before you've even opened the seal.
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Alice and I are both huge lovers of creating hand-drawn cards, and I consider myself and my family particularly lucky to be annual recipients of a special Alice creation just for our birthdays. They are treasures we will keep forever and perhaps one day I'll get around to taking some pictures of my favourites and sharing them here.
This year, the birthday card Alice made for my daughter, Remie, doubled as an example for a workshop I was lucky enough to run for two of our stockists and their customers in Japan. Inspired by our Secret Skies collection, the theme was "What kind of bird would you be?", created as a piece of Mail Art, which is simply the act of making the envelope a thing of beauty—often with the stamps and the address humorously or carefully inserted into the artwork.
I took Royal Mail stamps with me (still very much confused by the change of head even a few years in!), and asked the children I met to draw a card and decorate an envelope which incorporated their address and the stamp as part of their design. I told them that I would then take these back to the UK and post them back to them in Japan.
I wanted to do this in part so they could feel the anticipation of receiving something they had created, a letter to themselves which in itself is such a beautiful thing, but I also wanted the children to imagine the journey their piece of artwork would make, like a bird returning to them, drawing parallels with the risks facing migratory birds on their annual journeys. I asked them to think what it might be like to be that bird, and what they might need for their long journey and to include this in their illustrations. My example card I showed them included my bird carrying brocolli and apples and a Forivor blanket, of course!
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It was so lovely to see this concept come to life in the imaginations of children as they pored over books of different birds they felt an affinity with. Exploring books of Japanese birds with the children, I found both the similarities and differences between the bird life we have in the UK and some of their more exotic relatives really fascinating. I learnt about the Toki, a bird off the coast of Niigata where I ran one of the workshops with our lovely stockist Poupons. And reading a lovely book at Peekabooyah in Takamatsu, I discovered that the Bewick’s swan, which we have included in our collections, travels from the UK to Siberia, as well as from Japan to Siberia.
I've included a few pictures of some of the artwork created by children in Japan, soon they will be winging their way back to Japan from Wales and it is a very lovely thing to imagine their beautiful drawings travelling back to them, even if it is on a mechanical airplane. There's nothing nicer than receiving a hand drawn card from a loved one so we hope that perhaps in reading this you might be encouraged if you don't already to take a moment to draw a little picture or write a card and pop it in the post box for someone important to you.
