A Fat Pack of Wow from Linda French!

Lordy but Linda is a productive artist, and with every new mailing from her it seems her skills get more and more sophisticated. Here's the latest envelope:

In the practice of mail art there is always a bit of an attempt to see how boldly we can flout the rules, regulations and conventions of the world's postal services. In this innocent-looking example, Linda has stamped both sides of the envelope with perfectly legal US postage. On the front side, with the addresses, there are some very nice uncancelled vintage stamps--I could steam them off and use them on y next mailing! The stamps that went through the cancellation machine are actually on the reverse side. So what? So it means some mail clerk had to do what mail clerks often hate to do: look at the letter and make a decision. Hopefully, said mail clerk also got a smile from doing it.

First out of that fat envelope was a little package wrapped in some fine onion-skin type of paper which, upon unwrapping, proved to be a sheet from a sewing pattern for what looks like a toddler's onesie outfit.

What was wrapped inside? Why, this was:

Message Board

The image above is the obverse and reverse sides of a ca. 4x5 card made on corrugated cardboard. The backside is painted or monoprinted, signed and dated. The front is a wonderful web of black string or floss caging in little "messages, cut bits of folded text and patterned paper. Several rectangular bits of colorful painted paper are mosaic'd with colored notebook binder reinforcement rings and all is pasted down over yet another beautifully brightly painted surface. Clever, intricate, tactile and beautiful.

But wait! There's more!

Linda knows I am a member of Karen Champlin's ATC Rebels group on the IUOMA Ning platform, and has sent me a number of wonderful artist's trading cards, both originals and some giclee prints. There are a couple really cool Zentangle-type cards, a fun and funny "paint by numbers" and a pretty sweet pen and watercolor drawing of some sort of grass or grain. The bottom card is embellished with parts from a golden pin of some sort--a lapel pin or tie tack perhaps?

And finally there is this:

 

This is an ATC-size "magazine," or, rather, the cover and two of the dozen or more two-page "spreads" from this tiny magazine. I have only included a sampling, because, after all, I don't have to share everything, do I? 

Linda, you have really stuffed a lot of wonder in that envelope! Thanks so much for sharing your bounteous creativity with me.