Welcome Home!

I recently had the delightful pleasure of welcoming home my Favorite Music postal letterbox after 4 years in circulation. I can't tell you how excited I was to see it again!

We started letterboxing 6 years ago in Missouri, and this postal letterbox ring was created just a few months before we left Missouri to live in Maine. The premise was to create a letterbox based on our favorite music, and include a CD sample of it as a way of introducing it to the others in the ring. I listened to lots of music I probably wouldn't have ever heard of otherwise, and I enjoyed all of it because of the personal connection. Even the Grateful Dead. :)

I sewed the pouches that hold the logbook and the stamp with leather reclaimed from a coat I inherited from my great uncle years ago. It is soft and worn to perfection.

The logbook is a piano hinge book covered with textured paper and painted with Lumiere's metallic acrylic paints.

The inside cover holds the CD which was burned with 8 tracks from Caedmon's Call's album "In the Company of Angels." I used alcohol inks to dye the CD and adhered a print of the stamp image to the first page.

This is the inner, smaller pouch which holds the stamp.





















The stamped image is glued onto the wood block which backs the rubber stamp.

The stamp has to be carved in reverse, which is hard enough without all these intricate lines. :)

I found this design on the Caedmon's Call website and modified it slightly for my stamp image. The carving is nowhere near perfect, but it's by far the hardest one I've attempted to date.



Cædmon’s Call attributes its unusual name to Cædmon, acknowledged as the earliest (7th century) known English poet. An Anglo-Saxon monastery herdsman, he never participated in his fellow herdsmen’s communal feasting and singing, citing his ignorance of “the art of song.” While asleep one night, he had a dream in which he was asked to sing principium creaturarum, "the beginning of created things." After initially refusing, Cædmon wrote a short poem praising God as the creator of heaven and earth. Upon awakening the next morning, he remembered everything he had sung in his dream and added additional lines to his poem.

This was the beginning of what many considered to be a call to a miraculous gift; Cædmon went on to become a prolific religious poet, widely regarded as divinely inspired. Drawing on this inspiration, the group’s music is a blend of folk, celtic and alternative...but the lyrics are the best part of their songs.