Chick Trip ...Letter writing..Envelopes....Keep the FUN going!!

Five Chicks on a Road Trip

Chick Trip Documentation

Writing Fellow Chicks

Charter Members and New Recruits!

Home Made Envelopes

Custom Stationery from Ephemera

Ok.  This post is going to be a peek into my personal life. I've seen other mail bloggers combine letter writing with other personal pursuits...journaling...paper crafting...sewing...  Hey!  If we can combine pie baking and letter writing...I figure a diversion into my "Five Chicks on a Road Trip" is permissible.    So if you are not interested in my personal life, you might want to skip the first part of the post and head to the middle-ish  part of the blog.

 I am an identical twin (my better half living in NY) and I have an older sister who hails from the great state of Texas.  We still have our very active (and I mean A-C-T-I-V-E) mother who is "gun ho" for just about anything we dream up.  We , along with my late father's half- sister who is my age (does that make her my half- aunt?, I  just consider her a cousin...and a wonderful one at 

that) decided that time was slipping away from us.  We needed to grasp what time remains for us on this good earth and spend some time together...thus....the "Five Chicks on a Road Trip" was born.

Here are some scenes from our first exotic location...Southern Illinois (visiting some of my late father's remaining relatives).  Those on the cover are the charter members of our little group.  Are you wondering what sort of caps are on our head?

 Yep.  those little paper caps are the Steak 'N Shake  cook's caps.  One of our little rules  in this group is that you have to absolutely CRAVE Steak ' N Shake!  We eat there almost exclusively  on our trips.  (slight exaggeration there.)

And contrary to popular opinion...there  ARE things to do in Illinois.  I won't bore you with any more from the first trip.  All you need to know is, it was a complete success--even without an exotic destination.

 Last year's Chick Trip  had a bit more alluring attraction.  We decided to descend upon my cousin (a.k.a 1/2 aunt's) home in beautiful Melbourne, Fla. (notice the typo on the book cover?).  My cousin was beautifully accommodating to all of us (we included 3  teenage daughters in the mix as well.  And her Husband, was delightful...bearing up well under the female invasion.  He hid out at his parents for a good bit of the time.  :)  What a guy!

The top left picture is a scene from Crocodile Dundee (we thought a good croc film was on tap, seeing we were in the infested land of crocodiles!)  The next film we exposed our daughters to was JAWS...none of them had seen it.  The following day we hit the beach!  Bad hair days...BP checks (two of us are R.N.'s) and just loafing around were all par for the course. Oh the crazy fun we all had!

Now for this year...the Five Chicks have  allowed the Texas Delegation to determine our destination.  So, South Padre Island is it for 2014!  A few of us were a bit disappointed that it wasn't a Dude Ranch in the Rio Grande!  This gets us to the Letter Writing aspect of  this post. I want to send out a letter to the charter members of our group and of course to our new recruits and thought it would be fun to use some of the ephemera I collected from last year's trip.  

Uhhh...for those of you that don't appreciate me slinging around words that you might think I am making up...here is the definition.

e·phem·er·on

  [ih-fem-uh-ron, -er-uhn]  Show IPA

noun, plural e·phem·er·a  [ih-fem-er-uh]  Show IPA ,e·phem·er·ons.

1.

anything short-lived or ephemeral.

2.

ephemera, items designed to be useful or important for only ashort time, especially pamphlets, notices, tickets, etc.

I have been mildly surprised by the number of people that have never heard of making envelopes before, so I thought I would do a little on that using my Discovery maps that my host so kindly supplied me!

Aren't these great?  (sorry for my lack of photography capability!)

Lots of good stuff here to work with!  Oh and it is a double sided map! Oh Joy!

These are the envelope templates I use...but I have taken apart envelopes that I like and made my  own templates.  

I'm sure there are other brands just as nice.  This works well for me.

After  cutting out the envelope, then place the center part in to help with the folding (this helps you to have nice crisply folded edges).

Add a bit of glue.

Almost done...

Add your choice of labels..a few stickers...rubber stamping?

I had plenty of maps left over to make some stationery.  

So, now to get to the letter writing.  Why not give it a try , make your own stationery and envelopes.  You might want to try using last year's calendars.  The possibilities are endless.

Write Letters...write often.

Lady Pamela