Sunday, February 7, 2010

Letter for Valentines' Day

When I was a younger person, I wrote a lot of letters.
I also got to be a part of an awesome youth group
in church. The younger girls and I liked exchanging
lengthy (what we called) redundant letters about whatever
was going on in our lives. It started out as a comfortable
way to get to know each other especially for a new
member with questions about boys/life/faith/school/
the miseries of adolescence in general. Sometimes we
shared more personal issues and I got to slip in a bit
of advice/mentoring/Agony Aunt help. Sometimes I
wrote them to keep awake during Physics lectures in
college - and I'd slip in useless bits of Fluid Dynamics
equations just to annoy the unlucky girl I was writing to.
He he. Part of the fun was also trying to outdo each
other in the bizarre ways of presenting these
correspondences. We hardly used envelopes if we
could help it - we rolled the letters, folded them
funny, put them in boxes, wrote on the backs of
packaging materials...... such silly and precious
times, and such precious young girls they were
(now amazing women).

One of those girls taught me this
very cool way to fold a letter:

First, you write the letter:


Then fold it in half to enclose the message

Fold down about half an inch of the folded edge.

Flip it over and fold in half to get the vertical midline.

Fold down the top edge on each side to meet the midline.

Fold up the bottom corners.

Fold up that excess bottom bit.

Flip the whole thing over AND turn it upside down.
You'll get an uninteresting triangle with a
little pocket at the bottom:



Fold one side down to tuck into that little pocket



and fold down the other side to tuck into that same pocket.


Flip it over and - gasp - it looks the same!



We felt like we were in an exclusive club, with only
the members being privvy to the secret of
opening this little package.

But sometimes, we were nice and wrote names
on the side that can be opened:


It's a dying art, letter-writing is, in this day of email
and printed cards and twitter and texting. I hope you
write some letters this Valentine's Day! And receive
some, too (also hopefully without Physics in them)!


5 comments:

  1. I love "real" letters! So sad that they are so few and far between now. Thanks for sharing that folding tutorial - I have someone in mind for it already (and may not write on the opening side, just to give her an extra challenge!)

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  2. This is really neat, and not a folding style I've seen before. Thanks for the tutorial!

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  3. Ah redundant letters! those were the days ...

    xx rachael

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  4. I remember those letters, and the Physics equations too!! Tee hee! :p

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  5. What fun! I'm going to show this to my young friends.

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