more on winter

Posted by eliza b on February 19th, 2008 filed in winter
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I think I’m about to put out a contract on Puxatawny Phil, or whatever that groundhog’s name is that damned us all to six more weeks of winter.  Especially since I managed to catch the World’s Worst Freakin’ Cold ™ last week, which totally derailed my plans to get the saddle-stitch tutorial up here for y’all.

However, one of the things I do when I’m down for the count is to peruse the local websites and look for niftykeen new places in my area that I haven’t had a chance to explore yet.  And lo and behold!

Lookie what I found!

This, I might add, is mere MINUTES away from my house.  I knew it was there, and I knew there was a geocache in it at one point, but I had NO CLUE that there were THAT many trails in it.  Miles and miles of them, actually.  Up and down and all around in the Loess Hills, which is probably the only part of this area that has any elevation at all.  (No, seriously — less than a mile away is the famed “Mount Crescent Ski Area”.  With all of its 100 feet of ski run, since it’s a hill, not a mountain, as the name might suggest.)

This is the only part of winter I like — discovering new places that I can pepper with boxes when nobody’s looking.  And considering both a) its proximity to my house (literally a mile or two down the road and a sharp left), and b) all the stamps I’ve been carving….it’s like a marriage just waiting to happen.

Now I REALLY can’t wait for Spring.

Saddle-stitch tutorial coming this week or early next, when we have sun for pictures again.  (Overcast and grey right now….*again*.  Or maybe the word is “still”.  ARGH.)

lb101 - Logbooks and trail journals tutorial (part II)

Posted by eliza b on February 5th, 2008 filed in lb101, tutorials - bookbinding
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I meant to get this up for you folks a little sooner, but we’ve been having some more Weather, capital-W, out thisaway, and it’s making picture-taking a little bit difficult. So some of the photos on this tutorial are a little fuzzy, due to light issues, but I think you should be able to see them well enough to get the gist of what I’m saying.

Last week, we yapped a little bit about how to make your own creative logbooks. The simple ways, at least. For those that are looking to do something hand-made and a little more involved, I thought I’d show y’all how I make the japanese-bound logbooks I’ve been prone to putting in my own boxes. They’re a little more labor-intense than just a plain saddle-stitch (which I’ll show you how to do next week — the pictures for that one REALLY didn’t turn out well since the covers were so dark…), but easy enough that you can whip a few up when you have an hour or two to kill, and the results look much more impressive than the effort would suggest.

SPOILER WARNING: This is going to be a LIVE LETTERBOX in the OMAHA, NE area, as soon as Mother Nature stops handing us copious amounts of snow. IF YOU ARE THE TYPE who does NOT like to see boxes or stamps before you seek them out, or you’re planning to letterbox in the OMAHA, NE area….you might want to skip this post. I don’t want to ruin your surprise!

FAIR WARNING!

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Still here?

Then THIS is what we’re going to make:

This is the logbook and stamp for the Moving City letterbox, to be placed here in Omaha in the spring of 2008. It’s part of the Weird Nebraska series, and it’s all handmade.

Japanese stab-binding is one of the easiest kinds of bookbinding to do — it takes very little time or effort in comparison to other types of “real” bookbinding, and still gives cool-looking results.

First, let’s assemble our materials:

What you’ll need:

1. a stack of papers cut to twice the length of your letterbox, folded in half and stacked as a unit with all the folded edges on one side. I use regular printer paper for this, since the pages are doubled and there’s not all that much bleed-through.
2. a dremel tool with a thin drill-bit, or an awl (a sharp pointy thing)
3. A glu-stick of some kind. I use UHU because it holds up in Weather.
4. A bone folder or dull butterknife.
5. Cardstock (not shown…it’s hiding behind the map paper)
6. Decorative paper, one sheet for most logbooks.
7. Needles. I use tapestry needles because they’re thicker and have larger eyes.
8. waxed linen thread. This is bookbinding thread, though regular waxed linen will work in a pinch, if doubled. You can get bookbinding thread at Turtle Arts for cheap, by the way.
9. A pair of pliers is optional, but helpful if you don’t have strong hands.
10. a couple of bulldog clips or clamps to hold the block together while drilling/sewing.

It seems like a long list, but there’s nothing all that out of the ordinary, if you’re already into making your own books.

Step 1: Make Your Covers

For this, just cut two pieces of cardstock just slightly larger than your folded pages. We’re talking a scant 1/8″ larger — if they’re too much larger width-wise, you’ll end up tearing it with your bookbinding thread, and the fore-edge (the part at the bottom in the finished picture) will get all raggedy with use. They need to be just slightly larger so that the book block (pages) is covered, but not so large that it screws up the sizing.

Cut two pieces of decorative paper that are around 1/4″ SMALLER than your pages, and cover the backs with the glu-stick. Center them roughly on the cardstock pieces, and rub them down well. It’s okay if they’re a little wonky — this is a letterbox, not a juried show.

STEP 2: GET THE DRILL

Sandwich your book pages between the covers. Line up the open, unfolded edges of the papers with the top/to-be-bound edge of the covers, and hold them together with the bulldog clips or clamps. You’ll want them held firmly so that you can drill/awl them easily — floppy pages make drilling not so simple.

You’re going to drill through the entire block and the covers, 1/2″ or so from each edge, and then two more holes in the middle, evenly(ish) spaced. I tend to eyeball this, but you can do the math if you want things to be precise. Mark the placement of the holes with whatever writing-implement you might have — you’ll be drilling through it and then sewing through it, so the marks won’t show.

If you’re not comfortable with the book being in your hand while you drill (or you don’t have fabulous health insurance for the puncture wounds that could occur), lay the edge against a block of scrap wood or on top of a throwaway cardboard box and drill straight down through all layers.

To recap: you’re drilling through the covers and the UNFOLDED EDGES of the book pages. The folded edges will become the NONBOUND side of the book. (In other words, the pages are all double-thickness, open at the top and bottom and folded at the fore-edge.)

STEP 3: SEWING

I am going to be the first to admit that I might be doing the sewing “wrong” by traditional japanese standards. I leave my knot and tails exposed, since I tend to tie things to the thread-ends — beads, secondary mini-books, a badger….something. Plus, I like that look.

There are about seven zillion books out there with more traditional sewings for stab-bound books, including some where the binding knots and ends are hidden from view. I’ll list those next week when I talk about saddle-stitching and other bindings, and list all the resources for hand-binding books. But for our purposes, we’re going to go with this easy way.

Now that you’ve drilled, you should have this:

(numbers added by me, of course) You have a bookblock with four holes in it.

Thread your needle with a single length of waxed bookbinding thread. Don’t worry about a knot — you’ll be tying one at the end of the sewing. The thread should be around two feet long for an average letterbox, larger if you’re doing a bigger book (duh). After you do one or two of these, you’ll see how much you need. It doesn’t use a whole lot.

Insert your needle into hole #2, and leave a long-ish tail. (About five inches or so.) Then sew in this order:

Up through hole 1. Wrap the thread around the side of the book and go back UP through hole 1 AGAIN. Wrap the thread around the top of the book and go back up through hole 1 for the THIRD TIME. Your hole might be getting snug at this point. Grab some pliers and pull it through if your hands aren’t cooperating.

Go back down through hole 2, and come up at hole 3.

Go down in hole 4. Wrap around the side, go back through 4. Wrap around the top, and make your third pass in hole 4.

Come up in hole 3, wrap around the top of the book and come up in 3 again.

Go down in hole 2.

Tie the two ends together at the top of hole 2. Cut your ends to be roughly the same, and VOILA! BOOK!

It sounds much more complicated than it is. Once you do it once or twice, you’ll be an old pro — it’s MUCH easier hands-on than to read about it.

You’re almost done, but first, the finishing touches….

STEP FOUR: FINISHING YOUR BOOK
The last thing you have to do before you decorate the book is to crease the cover a bit. Stab-binding is a bit inflexible compared to other bindings, and eats up a quarter of an inch or so of your interior papers. When you’re making blank journals or something, it’s not that big of a deal, but in letterboxes, where space is at a premium, keep in mind that your stampable area will be a little less than the size of your cut pages.

Because it’s a little rigid and cardstock doesn’t fold all that well, you’ll need to crease your cover, like so:

Using a bone-folder edge or the back edge of a butter knife (less pressure with the latter, since you don’t want to rip the cover), press a slight depression into the cover. You can put some arm in it if you’re using a bone folder — the better the crease, the better your book will open, which means the more stampable area there will be for the finders.

Crease the cover, and then open it up so that the cover folds along the crease. It should open relatively easily now, like magic.

All that’s left is to customize the book further for the letterbox it’s going to be in. I tend to put an image of the stamp on the cover (collaged on, rather than stamped on, since it doesn’t show well on the decorative papers, unless they’re blank.), and embellish around that somewhat. For the Movable City box, it was just a big red X on the map paper, which was enough to give it some interest without being too overdone.

On the inside cover, I tend to put the story of the box (if either it or the location requires some explanation), along with a link to atlasquest.com, my email address, and a note for geocachers telling them that the logbook and stamp are NOT tradable or swappable, since there’s been a rash of geocachers stealing the stamps or logbooks, thinking that they’re caches rather than letterboxes. (Hand-carved stamp does NOT equal a FLIP FLOP, people! Argh!) Like so:

And now, all that’s left is to pop that sucker in a baggie and grab those lock&locks to go plant it!

Next week: saddle stitching (much less labor-intensive) and resources.

Stay tuned!

lb101: Logbooks and trail journals, O My! (part I)

Posted by eliza b on January 28th, 2008 filed in lb101
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So you’ve had a couple weeks now to play around with rubber stamp carving, and I’m going to assume that you have created fabulous masterpieces (or at least ones that don’t suck, in your own estimation).  And now you have stamps ready to be letterboxes.

The next step, once you’ve picked a location (which I’ll talk about next week, most likely), is to make yourself a logbook to go into the box with the stamp.

Just like with stamp carving, these things don’t need to be ornate and elaborate.  They CAN be, of course.  And some of them are mind-bogglingly complex and intricate and beautiful.  Those are the boxes that you find and you sit down with the contents and lick them for a while because they’re so pretty.  (That could, mind you, be just me.  Ahem.)

But also like stamp carving, if the thought of having to learn a whole new set of skills is making you weak-kneed and avoidant….skip it.  I’ve seen boxes where the logbook is nothing more than a $.79 mini-notebook, and they are just as much fun as getting the ones with the coptic-bound, hand-made papers, gilt-edged and perfectly-book-pressed logbooks.  The point is:  you found the box.   Everything else is just a bonus.

So what do you need for a basic logbook?  We’ll go from the simplest ones to the more elaborate here:

1.  The easiest, and probably most common when I was letterboxing before (when handmade logbooks were few and far between, really…), are those aforementioned $.79 notebooks, spiral-bound with wire, roughly 3″ x 5″.  For some boxes that are smaller, they’ve been sheared down at one end to fit, even.

For these, you can just put it in as-is, with an inscription on the inside front cover that says what your box is, the location or the date placed, and your contact info.  (Which should really be in all logbooks, just so finders can contact you to give you status updates or praise you for a fabulous box.  Seriously.)

Alternately, you can decorate the cover somewhat — either with the stamp image or collage or both, or paint it to match some part of your box theme…the possibilities are endless.

Here’s an example, from one of my Seattle boxes, now MIA and probably gone, due to construction (so I’m not giving any image spoilers, since it’s good & gone)….

2.  One step up from the mini-notebooks is mini-sketchpads.  They’re usually a little more expensive, but have a bit thicker paper to withstand all the crazy stamping that people do with crazy dye inks.  For example:  (same spoiler thing — box is history, probably abducted by kids.  Sigh.)

For that one, I used the initial pencil sketch from whence the stamp came, and put the story of the box’s title around it, since the words on the box were a direct quote/tagline that needed (in my mind) some explanation.

3.  A few MORE ways you can do the small spiral binding, if you want to be a little more handmade, but don’t want to go with any commercial options:

•     Collect your pages and covers and have Kinko’s punch and bind them all.  It’s not too costly, though will be more money than the buy-them-off-the-rack options, for sure.
•     Buy a spiral binding machine.  (Be aware that a COMB binding machine is not a substitute.  Pages tend to come out of short comb-bound things, in my experience.)  It’s expensive — right around $200 USD — but if you plan on attempting to be the next Wanda and Pete, it might not be a bad investment.  Figure that 200 letterbox placements with $.79 logbooks would just about pay for a machine, after all.  And then you can bind your personal logbooks, too.  (I have one, can you tell?  Love it.  Lovelovelove.  But it’s definitely a toy.)
•     Use a hole punch, evenly spaced down the length of the loose pages, and bind them with either jumprings (for jewelry) or keyrings without fobby bits.  (Or WITH the fobby bits, if you’re feeling creatively inspired and have room in your box.)

This is getting longer than I thought it would, so I think I’m going to split this into a few different entries, just to make it simpler.  Next week, then, I’ll go over things like sewn and/or saddle-stitched bindings at home, and some creative ways to make a stapled book that doesn’t look like the ones you might have made in fifth grade.  And I’ve got some FABULOUS links to bookbinding sites with simple instructions, and a couple of people on Flickr who have shown off their Mad Skillz to inspire you.

Stay tuned!

lb101: addendum, stamp carving books

Posted by eliza b on January 20th, 2008 filed in lb101
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And then I up and forgot to add some books on stamp carving for those of you with…uh…little book-buying problems. (I don’t know about y’all, but man, when I get into something, I need to immerse myself. So I have a LOT OF BOOKS. Like, a LOT. Like, “One Day They Will Crush Me” a LOT.)

First, a book by a letterboxer:

Carve Your Own Itch
by Bob Clark

Bob used to be the guy in charge of the zine “Tabloid Trash”, which was all about mail art and stamp carving. He’s amassed about eighteenzillion tips and techniuqes, and offers up 300 illustrations that you can use to test out your stamp carving desires without sitting there scratching your head trying to figure out what to carve. There are many photo tutorials inside, too.

Then there’s:

Art Stamping Workshop
by Gloria Page

Gloria Page isn’t a letterboxer, that I know of. But what she IS is an amazing freakin’ artist who has carved stamps and put them on cards that are selling in the Smithsonian. Seriously. If you want to get arty with your stamps, or you want to know what to do with all those practice stamps that you’re not going to put into letterboxes, this is totally the book for you. There are some step-by-step how-tos in here for finished arty objects, as well as lots of stamp carving info that rocks. Her other book, “Holy Moly Mackeroly” is really fabulous, too, from a first-person artist’s account of making a go at making a living from art, if you’re interested in that, and does touch on stamp carving a bit, as well.

And finally:

The Weekend Crafter: Rubber Stamp Carving
by Luann Udell

If you want the staple book, the one that has all the pictures and the techniques, and comes highly recommended by all levels of stamp carvers for a pretty decent price ($15 or so), this is the book you’ll want to get. From just getting started to a lot of advanced soft-block techniques, it’s got EVERYTHING. It came out after I’d already been carving for three years or so (I started in 1999, see.), but it’s the book I would have wanted when I was embarking on this art form, and the one that I’ve gone back to again and again for inspiration of the how-to sort. Very clear, illustrated instructions and well-organized. And WELL worth the fifteen bucks. (Or $8, right now, used on amazon.)

I’ll add to this list if I find more in my collection that I’ve forgotten about.  I do that sometimes.

See you next week!

letterboxing 101: carving creative stamps, part 1

Posted by eliza b on January 20th, 2008 filed in lb101
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I’ve got this list here, see.  This list of topics I want to cover over here while the snows are still flying and there’s no possible way I can go out and actually DO what it is that I’m writing about.  (As an interesting matter of fact: it’s snowing now.  Again.  Third time this week.  Snow + snow + snow = frustrated letterboxer in Iowa.  Seriously.)

Anyway — I get people askingme about certain parts of letterboxing over and over again.  And rather than explaining it each time,  I thought that instead of waiting around to make actual “Here’s what I ‘boxed today” posts when it’s spring, I’d do a series of basic entries here, so I can point people over here when they have questions.  (And, by the way, there is NOTHING WRONG with asking the questions.  *I* had the same exact questions when I started, for the most part.  It’s only when you ask and find the answers that you’ll learn, right?)

So for the first entry like this, I thought I’d dive right in and talk about stamp carving for a little bit.  I’ll be linking some relative sites of interest that have photos (due to the snow and cloud-cover, I’m kind of screwed for taking my own pictures today, so links will have to suffice, I’m afraid.), and possibly a book or two, too.

On with it!

The thing that holds a lot of people up, when they first learn about letterboxing, is the idea of the hand-carved stamp, either for their own signature stamp or for boxes they want to place.  I’ve heard everything from, “Well, I haven’t had time to learn how to carve stamps, yet,” to “I can’t draw, so I can’t really make my own stamps.”

People, listen — if you are truly talentless (which I seriously doubt you are — you might surprise yourself if you just try…) you can walk your happy letterboxer-to-be ass into a Michael’s and pick out a stamp off the racks of pre-made stamps and still be EVERY BIT AS GOOD as a hand-carver.  No, seriously.  Listen to me here. Do NOT let the stamp be the one thing that holds you back from getting into it.  Because, truly, once you DO get into it, you’ll eventually start carving your own.  It’s a natural evolution, like growing mold on your cheese.

Okay, fine, so that’s probably not the best example.

But it’s true:  once you start seeing the range of stamps that are out there,  you’ll probably be inspired to try a few of your own.  And in the meantime?  You’re still out there seeing the range of stamps, with your very own represents-you signature stamp purchased right off the rack.  And if you’re out there doing it, it’s a Good Thing(tm, Martha).

Now, carving your own doesn’t have to be difficult.  In fact, the simpler the stamp, the easier to carve (of course), but also (!!!), some of the most simple designs can have the best results EVAR.  A couple of my favorite stamp finds have been ones that aren’t all that intricate or detailed or precisely executed.  And I’ve seen some stamps that the owners would call Really Crappy Carves that had some fabulous hikes, or great clues, and  thus, have been faaaabulous boxes to go get, even though there are some out there who would think the stamp wasn’t all that worth it.  (There is no pleasing some folks.  Keep that in mind.)

Besides, we all started somewhere.  And I’d wager that some of those stamp-carvers who are reproducing the Sistine Chapel nowadays were once carving little heart shapes into erasers with choppy lines and breaks.  Because we ALL were beginners once.  The key is to not judge yourself too harshly to begin with.

There are a couple of really great tutorials out there on the web.  Atlas Quest, the letterboxing site of choice (for me), has a whole series of articles on the basics of stamp carving.   There’s a great tutorial over on zenheart’s livejournal with lots of pictures that was linked in the CRAFT:magazine blog.  And Gennine posted a two part tutorial (part 1, part 2) in her art blog that’s beautifully illustrated.  There’s even a PDF of a stamp carving workshop that stamp-in-the-box gives at letterboxing gatherings available online, and RuthAnn Zaroff’s whole entire SITE dedicated to carving stamps.

There is, in other words, a WHOLE LOT of information out there about getting started, so I’m not going to go too far into the mechanics of the whole thing, since it’s been said and been said much better than I can say it.

The key, though, is to JUST DO IT, to steal a little phrase from Nike.

And if you don’t do it, don’t beat yourself up, either.  Buy a stamp, strap on some shoes, and go play.

We carvers will infect you with our enthusiasm anyway.  We’re sneaky like that.

In the coming weeks, I’ll post a little discussion of carving mediums, stamp types, and mounting ideas, as well as a little bit on creative stamping — the stamps that might be simple, but make you go “ooooooooooh…how did they think of doing THAT!?”.

Stay tuned.

On Being an Evangelist

Posted by eliza b on January 11th, 2008 filed in musing
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I haven’t forgotten you all; I still have major plans for expanding this site to have more than just a few random bloggymusings and a list of the letterboxes I’ve planted. However, this past week, I was struck with The Major Migraine From Hell(tm), and ended up pretty much flat on my back for a few days.

Lovely, that. I blame the media. Or maybe the insane amounts of caffeine I’ve been ingesting to stay awake for the other stuff I do every day. One of the two.

That said, a lot of people are finding letterboxing via some talking one of my co-hosts and I did on the Lime & Violet podcast. (I’d wager that most of you reading this, in fact, are from that very podcast, but I thought I’d mention it for any wandering knitterboxers who found it independently.)

I am, to say the least, chuffed. I love it when new people find this activity and get all into it, carving stamps and placing new boxes and finding tons of them and bringing with them a general excitement that some of the old-timers appear to have lost on a trail somewhere.

However, I think I might be in the minority. There’s talk on various letterboxer gathering sites (more the traditional ones than AtlasQuest, which is really my online destination of choice) about how some people take great pleasure at being annoying or mean to newbies, to squelch out that New Boxer Excitement. They, apparently, are sick of answering the same questions over and over, and there’s even an attitude out there about how you shouldn’t even talk about letterboxing to people, because it’s a solitary, secretive activity, and that adds to the mystique of the whole thing, blah blah blah.

You can’t see me right now, but my eyes are totally rolling into the back of my head at that one.

I can kind of see how you wouldn’t necessarily want to see a feature on letterboxing on the NBC evening news or something. The more people that know about ‘boxing, the greater the chance of some destructive asshats finding out about it and vandalizing your boxes, or muggles finding the clues online and misunderstanding, or geocachers stealing your stamps and putting a rubber duckie in its place. (Oh, but seriously — a geocacher found one poor letterboxer’s intricately hand-carved stamp in a box and TOOK IT, replacing it with, I kid you not, a FLIP FLOP SHOE. That’s a geocacher that needs a solid beatin’.) There’s a certain percentage of the population who just wouldn’t get it, and another, smaller percentage of people who would want to find them just to destroy them or take them. I know this. But it’s a risk you take in putting your stuff out there for people to enjoy. Hell, an animal can take your box and chew up the contents, even. Nothing is SAFE unles you leave it in a closet, and what’s the point in THAT?

And I do understand that the same questions, over and over, can get annoying. We get that a bit on the podcast, in fact. But being mean to people just takes all the wind out of their sails, and discourages them from getting involved to begin with. Why deprive yourself of a heap of new boxes to find, or potentially nurturing some amazing stamp-carver, just because you’re annoyed at the questions? Seems a little pretentious to me.

Back when I started the IALC list over on yahoogroups, I did so because NOBODY was talking on the “big” list. (The LBNA group, for the record.) When I tried to get into conversation about the stamps, I was either ignored or told that the stamps didn’t matter — this activity was all about the hikes and if I was interested in the stamp carving, I could essentially find my own way to the door. I boggled a little bit, gathered together the other artsy stamp-carvers, and dragged them to a list where they could talk about whatever they wanted, with the frequency they wanted. Stamp carving, logbook making, or even which purple hiking socks were the best to wear on long hikes. Now, five years later, that group still talks about all the periphery, with a topic of the week and some fabulous people who have evolved into fabulous letterboxers, and who have spawned things like LTCs (we did an exchange of them long before the wiki on Atlasquest has them being “invented” by someone else), and the interest in postal boxes (which existed before, but nobody was talking about the really artsy ones, which seem to be more of the norm now in the wintertime).

My point is this — creativity is good. New energy is good. The more eyeballs and footfalls we can attract here, the more there is for the old-timers to do, too. And I admit it — I’m totally an evangelist. If you sit still around me for more than an hour or so, the chances that I’ll talk about letterboxing to you are probably pretty high. As soon as I know you aren’t one of the small percentage of freaks or destructive weirdos, I’m going to sing the song of treasure hunting to you. And those repetitive questions are JUST FINE with me. It means you’re interested.

And interest is the first step on the hike into being a great ‘boxer.

I, for one, am happy to usher in new blood.

A real post is due…

Posted by eliza b on January 2nd, 2008 filed in winter
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It’s about time, I’d say.

Winter is upon us here in the midwest.  For purposes of illustration, let me just say that outside right now, it’s -14 with wind-chill.  Fourteen BELOW zero farenheit.

I’m hardcore, when it comes to letterboxing.  I really am, at least in my own mind.  But I am not so hard core as to even consider leaving the house when it’s fourteen below zero.  Frostbite on places that I didn’t know I had skin is not conducive to a Happy Well-Adjusted Life for me.

So I’m indoors.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not active.  I try to read the boards every day over at Atlas Quest (and marvelling about Ryan’s trip to hike the Florida Trail…and not just a little jealous of him, I might add.).  I just picked up Randy’s book on letterboxing.  (I’ll put a link in the sidebar if you haven’t seen it.  It’s good, especially for newbies, and the section on compassing is fabulous.)

Most of all, I’m planning.  I’m plotting my slow takeover of this city by letterboxers.  World domination, one box at a time.

If I can’t actually *be* hiking, I figure I can carve stamps, make logbooks, put together boxes for the eventual placement.  I’m researching local recreation areas, finding new trails and historical sites, being inspired by the history of the area about which I never really knew.

When I was in Seattle, I used to look up the Parks Department’s website and read about the history of a particular park.  I tried pretty hard to make the box match the history, sometimes even carving historical figures or events that happened there.  (My Salmon Run series, for instance, is based on the fact that the local salmon would run to the park the boxes are in, and the park was established, in part, to let people watch the fish jump.)

Here, I’d like to do the same thing, but I’m finding that Omaha…?  Totally seedy.  No, seriously.  Omaha used to be a red-light district for people passing down the Missouri River.  Lots of houses of ill repute and gambling.  Which I personally find to be kind of awesome, but I think that the more kid-friendly ‘boxers might take issue to a series of Bordello boxes.

So I’m doing some series that aren’t based on the history so much.  Just highlighting some of the great parks here in town that I never knew existed.  My “Army of Darkness” series is in a fabulous (and HUGE) park here that has NO boxes currently.  Since it’s a big series, I’m hoping to attract letterboxers who are passing through, and keep them here long enough to plant a few of their own so *I* have something more to find.

It’s all selfish, see.

I’ve also got a series of Old McDonald’s farm that the IALC list carved way back in the days before I stopped doing this for a while.  The logbooks are done, the stamps are carved, I bought the lock & locks, and now…all I need is some sun.

Come on, Spring!

the obligatory test post

Posted by eliza b on December 27th, 2007 filed in Uncategorized
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This is a blog about a box.

Not just any box. A lock-n-lock tupperware box, in the middle of the wilderness. Only people with the clues know where the treasure is, and when they find it, they leave it there, hidden even better than the way they found it…

And it’s not just one box, either. It’s thousands and thousands of them. Inside, a stamp treasure awaits. And one is probably near you.

These are my stories of a life spent looking for handcarved stamps in tupperware boxes.

For more information, see atlasquest.com or letterboxing.org. Resources will follow when I get a chance to update.