I am a bit ahead on the Month-of-Letters-writing, if you go by numbers instead of days (wh. you shouldn't, of course, the point is to mail something every day!) -- wrote two Postcrossing cards this morning and a thank-you note, sent a birthday card to my mom on Saturday, and a proper letter the day before that. Above are last Thursday's effort, a letter and some 1:12-scale postcards to a fellow Postcrosser I've been exchanging e-mails with, post-postcard, because she likes miniatures and genealogy.
There are some printables around the internet for postcards, but most of them are one-side-only (presumably you arrange them in your particular setting and leave them there, or even glue them down, and the unprinted side never shows), or you print the two sides with an edge butting up against the other, then fold and glue them together. I was fairly pleased with my two-sided sheet-music experiments and wanted to see if the method would work for postcards, so gathered an assortment of actual Postcrossing cards -- because some dedicated Postcrossers have put their collections online, with the message and the stamp and the postmark, and in some cases even the full address, and of course because I'd decided to send the better results to C. -- and images of actual postage stamps from various countries around the world honoring Postcrossing. (Ireland has one, also Austria, Slovenia, the Channel Islands, Finland, the Netherlands, etc.) I used the postage-stamp images as the front of the postcard because I suspected that most postcard images are too detailed to scale down that small, and that an already-small postage-stamp image would "read" better as well as reduce more clearly.
My experiment I think was a qualified success -- in theory it should have worked well, as I arranged each image, scaled down to 1:12, with the fronts of the cards evenly spaced with their left edges down the left margin, and the backs with their right edges down the right margin, then printed onto plain cardstock two copies of the page, printed front-and-back. Some of them worked just about perfectly, lining up very well, but some were off by just enough that they are clearly wonky -- and at this scale, even a millimeter is apparent! This might have been due to the printer feeding the cardstock with slight hesitations now and then -- I can hear it do that as the cardstock feeds through, but of course that's unavoidable -- or it might have been a miscalculation on my part, I don't know.
It probably would have been better to choose images for the picture-side that have a good portion of white space around the edges, because that way a slight misalignment isn't nearly as obvious -- the Irish one in the middle of the right margin in the photo, for one, and the "World Post Day" one at upper left. But -- on the whole, I'm pleased, and although I sent the better set to C., I still now have a stack of postcards for a future desk setting!
Hi, Jeanne - Good job on the letter writing. I did InCoWriMo a couple of years ago and have one dedicated pen pal as a result. Two other people correspond on occasion. It is quite fun.
I bet you enjoyed the Rose Parade so much because your daughter was playing. Our son played the trumpet for six years in middle and high school and I loved watching him perform with the band. He doesn't play anymore; college keeps him plenty busy but I was kind of sad he didn't continue.
Posted by: Sarina | February 12, 2018 at 06:10 PM