Yes this post is about random stuff and I am really stretching the alliteration…

Correspondence

During my late teens and into my twenties I had regular pen pals. These pen pals including a friend who was studying in India and she would send me wonderful letters from India; and a friend who was studying abroad in Europe – Italy and the UK. I would get awesome long letters on a regular basis. It was the 1980s and 1990s and e-mailing was not yet a thing (public access to the internet wasn’t even a thing).

Then during the later 1990s into the 2000s and beyond, with e-mail and eventually texting and social media expanding, “snail mail”/postal mail correspondence evaporated from my life except for occasional cards/letters from my friend in Denmark and then Austria.

I missed writing and receiving physical correspondence with different people. It is so wonderful to hold a letter/card in your hand and read it instead of staring at a computer screen.

But over the past couple of years “snail mail” has resurfaced regularly in my life and I love it!

I’ve met a couple people through blogging that I correspond via postal mail with on a fairly regular basis as well as several friends around the US and the world that I’ve known in person. I’ve discovered a community of people who love sending and receiving letters.

I have a friend in Arkansas who is an excellent pen pal with exceptional penmanship (my handwriting is terrible and sometimes I just send typed letters inside a card) who is also very talented at decorating envelopes which makes the card or letter inside even more special.

Here is a recent envelope I received from her (and the dreamy card of reading a book on a train):

The sticker made me laugh – think I want to be a shenanigan enthusiast!:

Another fun envelope by the same friend (enclosed in another envelope with the postal address):

I have a California based pen pal who is an incredibly talented card maker. I’ve dabbled in card making but I am currently trying to use my large stash of purchased/thrifted cards.

Here is one of her amazing cards I was lucky to receive:

I keep correspondence in keepsake boxes and it’s fun to revisit cards and letters!

Charcuterie

I am obsessed with charcuterie boards and I even have a Pinterest board dedicated to charcuterie and I even bought the book The Art of the Board by Olivia Carney:

I’m still learning how to put together a good charcuterie board but I jump on any opportunity or excuse to make one. Recently I had a neighbor (who is a vegetarian) over to lunch and made with with my homemade hummus:

I know, I know, it’s not all on the same board and I am using little bowls which is probably cheating, but I am working on improving my “charcuterie-ing’ – ha! I’d like to get to the point of creating sunflower cheese boards like those pictured in the screen shot above of my Pinterest board.

Cute Roses

Ending this post of random stuff with an update from the July 12th post Agriculture Report: An Evolving Garden. Our roses in pots are now blooming big time. Here is an example of one of the pots which contains cute pink roses:

(I used marigolds in my rose pots for natural pest control)

So a couple days ago John and I decided to switch back my studio to another room and our bedroom back to the primary bedroom.

In case you have no idea what I am talking about, see this post from June 2025 – Thrifting for the Studio.

My studio is located in the former Primary Bedroom of the house. A couple years ago my husband John and I decided we didn’t need that much room for our main bedroom and moved to a smaller bedroom. Originally it was a carpeted room but in summer 2024 John put in a floor.

I’ve always had a small space to sew and craft until I met John and then a couple years ago we turned our primary bedroom (which is fairly large) into my studio.

However In my small crafting spaces I created entire bodies of work such as those I exhibited in my solo show (see 2019 post Solo Show Seattle Municipal Tower, Part III) The Wardrobe Meets the Wall. (And no new body of work has occurred in my large studio!)

I made that entire The Wardrobe Meets the Wall collection of 12+ quilts in a tiny little back bedroom of my house in Oregon where I had to use part of my hallway as my design wall.

I know of course I traveled a lot in 2025 but this has been an ongoing problem – I don’t seem to be as “creatively inspired” in a large space. I just had a gut feeling that I needed a cozy little space of creativity again.

So we switched the rooms back and Chaos in the Craft Room ensued:

Moving the contents of my large studio and walk in closet into a much smaller space was quite the undertaking!

The good thing of this move is I spent a couple days preparing for it and purging what I didn’t really need. It seems that I thrifted stuff to fill the space – I expanded to fill the space…

It took a couple days after we switched rooms to settle into my new room, which is less than half the size of the space I had in the primary bedroom, and here is what it looks like now:

Yes my design wall had to be split into half as it wouldn’t work in the room in it’s full size.

Besides giving me a small cozy space to work in to stimulate my creativity, John and I also made this switch because we are considering selling the house someday and moving to a smaller Ranch-style house. We recently toured houses in a cool new development in another section of the Denver Metropolitan area and fell in love with a one story house with a basement that could be finished however we liked.

We aren’t ready to sell/move just yet, but we were going to have to switch the rooms back anyway someday in order to put our house on the market.

So what became of my huge stash of craft supplies (most of them thrifted)? Well I moved all the sewing related supplies that didn’t fit in the studio shelves into the closet in my new studio:

The non sewing supplies got moved to the closet in the upstairs guest room which had previous housed my clothes, which are now moved into the walk in closet off the primary bedroom.

And…

As far as the Primary Bedroom, John and I took a couple days and turned it into a relaxing bedroom sanctuary. I want it to be our private sanctuary so I am not sharing any photos. (I recently saw on YouTube a tour of a Hollywood actor’s home on the Architectural Digest channel and she wouldn’t show her bedroom because she said that was her private sanctuary. That inspired me!)

Well here’s to getting into my cozy new studio and creating!