Mail Art 23: Please Hand Cancel

 

Hello. Welcome back and thank you for visiting. It's time to see what HORRORS are off to haunt mailboxes across the country (and the UK) once again. There's also a tidbit of interesting news related to the envelopes as well mixed in. Here, take a gander if you like...

LIGHTS OUT: I looked for some sort of monster for this one...but thought it didn't need one as it started to come together.It's not a great one, but I kind of like it. This piece o' mail art is off to a friend of mine. I really have been trying to (slowly) send all of my non-mail art friends something. I've gotten a handful taken care of so far, but have many, many left to go-go. Tony jumped to the front of the line after a surprise and very generous gift. This is a sort of thank you. Because I had to upgrade my tiki blog so I could keep adding pictures, gifs, etc., that cost me some money. I love my little tiki blog and hoped that if I put a donation thing on there, it could be self-sustaining. I was so embarrassed putting it on. I tried to hide it below the Tiki Tourist logo I made. But not long after I posted it, I got a notice that someone had sent in $50. WHAT!?! It took me a while to figure out how to track down who had made the donation. It turned out to be Tony. Oh my stars! THANK YOU so very much. 

IT CAME FROM THE BEYOND: This was for a new "friend request" on IUOMA. I have NO IDEA who JAC MAIL is, but she has apparently been an IUOMA (International Union of Mail Artists) for a long while. This is kind of a ripoff of one I did in my previous post, MONSTER FROM THE BEYOND. But this one came out much better. My biggest complaint is the tag line. I wishI had made it two separate sentences instead of one. ("They made the mistake of opening the locked room in the old house. It was a portal to the OTHER SIDE." would have read so much better. Darn.)

DOLLY:  In trying to catch up with mail artists I sent things to last year and getting something to them this year, Jon Foster was next. on the list. It turned out rather weak...

I received one of Ken B. Miller's Frankenstein-like cards. (Frankenstein in the sense that he uses parts of several different images to make up a whole new one.)

THE FAMILY CRYPT:  I made this for him as a reply. Eh... The skulls are back! If you see the skulls, I usually pull them in to "save" a lame envelope. 

HORROR IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD: For a while now, I've been wanting to send a "thank you" piece o' mail art to the father and son team of mail artists that directed me to IUOMA. I had sent them my very first piece of mail art in 20 years last year. It was fittingly made out of a piece I had started in the early 2000s, but never finished. It was a sort of "bridge" between my early mail art endeavors--and my resurrected adventures. That first one was kind of rough, but it was a getting back on the bike kind of moment for me. The new envelope I made for them--eh. It's still not great (I'm NOT Rembrandt or Picasso.), but I'm still out there trying.

PLAN 9 FROM PLANET TIKI: My friend (Tiki With) Ray Wyland has just been such a wonderful person to know. He has opened so many doors (figuratively) in the tiki world for my disabled butt to hobble through, I am in constant awe and amazement. He loves my mail art, too--more than anyone else I know. So, although I've made him envelopes in the past, I thought he'd like another. This one wasn't very successful either. I'd snapped a picture of Ray at a home tiki bar several weeks ago. The strange lighting cast blue and red hues on his head and caused a shadow from his glasses that gave him the appearance of having rather peaked eyebrows. I didn't know quite what to do with it, so I made a tiki rip-off version of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. It sucks, but... I tried. At least some of the verbiage is fun.

HORROR HULLABALOO: Ray's friends Grant & T'na had me over to their 1500 sq ft home tiki bar and let me stay the night. It was very nice of them, so I wanted to send them a thank you note. When I first received the invitation, I sent Grant a letter of introduction in a pirate-themed envelope. T'na seems to like spookier stuff and I thought she deserved an envelope--so this is what I came up with.

NIGHT IN THE EERIE CASTLE OF DOOM: I also met some bonfide tiki royalty at the party above. Ken and Heather Pleasant are the people behind the current incarnation of Witco (which is something probably only tiki people would understand).  Heather is the granddaughter of one of the founders, William Westenhaver. He taught Ken everything he knows about carving. It was incredible to get to meet them. Heather mentioned my envelopes. I think Ray had shared them with her. I wanted to make them something. I was just too tired to think... So I didn't make them anything tiki. They got the usual horror thang. I hope it is okay. 

Not that long ago, I made a series of envelopes for mail artist Coco Muchmore for a class she was doing on mail art at a local high school. I received a couple of things back from two of the students. I thought that was it, but then I got this thank you card from the instructor Coco was guest teaching for. She thanked me for my contribution and asked to stay in touch through mail art. I really can't take on any more mail art chores. But I thought I'd send her something anyway.

CRAWLSPACE OF TERROR: Eh... This one just is blah. I know exactly what is wrong with it, too. The house is too big. The title is too big. But mostly there is no monster or creature or whatever it is that would cause the screaming. Oh well.

Interestingly, I received a message from a stranger on my Instagram the other day. She apparently wanted to buy some of the images of my envelopes as NFTs. I asked her what she wanted to do with them. She said she just collects them. I ultimately dropped out of the conversation when I realized that all of the images on my envelopes were NOT mine. I don't own them. I harvested them from the internet. Yes, I rearranged them for my own purpose, but they are someone else's images. Oh well...

Ray got his PLAN 9 FROM PLANET TIKI envelope and posted a picture of himself holding it on his social media. Ray is like the biggest enthusiast for my envelopes. It boggles my mind. They're just envelopes. Ha! Anyway, he really wants me to do his TIKI WITH RAY show again, focusing on my envelopes alone. (I've made a few tiki envelopes, but most aren't... I guess he is okay with that.) If and when the episode is made, I'll share it in a future post.

CEMETERY SLUMBER PARTY:  As I said earlier, I've been slowing trying to send my non-mail art friends an envelope. A few years back when my internet had gone out, a serviceman came out to fix it. Another representative from the company also came out, trying to sell me on their phone service. He was blown away by the vintage horror movie posters on my walls. From that, we kind of hit it off. His name is Filliberto, but he goes by Bert. And here comes a mini-"movie poster" in the mail, I hope he likes it. 

And that, my freinds, is 10 new envelopes. The post has come to an end. Thank you for checking it out. I hope you'll visit again soon.

CHEERS!

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