Michael5000, Card Sharp (II)

So, a few weeks ago we discussed how one could, with only a little investment of time, energy, and equipment, make greeting cards out of old greeting cards!  But what, you might have asked, about postcards?  Are they not better than greeting cards?  And of course, they are.

My experiments with postcard production began with a set of prepaid blank postal cards that I have been packing around since 1994, when I used them as part of a dull survey project connected with my dissertation.  Usually, you put the address on the "stamp" side of these and some sort of message on the front.  But why not put address and message (and extra actual stamp to cover 17 years of increased postage, of course) all on the same side, like on a normal postcard, and slap an image on the front?  Why not indeed.

That image was from a stamps-by-mail catalog; this one is from a 1960ish magazine.

Then I remembered I had some watercolor-your-own-postcards blanks, and am profoundly unlikely to take up watercolor any time soon.  So, I used a couple of these as image platforms.

Of course, not every idea you think is going to be interesting really pans out...

...but then others turn out better than you expect.

I haven't really gone very far with this, but there are some cards where I've laid down an initial image with the thought of messing with additional layers.  We'll see.

So anyway, at some point I remembered my recent insight that cereal-box cardboard is the same general weight as postcard cardboard and started rummaging through the recycling for packaging.  A little precision cutting, and my new image platform was ready to go.

I find I have to kind of fight an impulse to glue the image to the blank side.  It definitely doesn't work when you've got images on both sides of your postcard.

And then, sometimes when you cut up packaging the result is enough fun that you decide it's fit to send just like that.

All they need is a stamp!  Which reminds me, I should tell you sometime about certain peculiarities I've recently discovered in the secondary philatelic market.  But that's a story for another day.