Stationery and The Building of Friendships -

Pen Pals Need Stationery!

By Katharine de Courtenay

Stationery is the blank page upon which friendships are built. It is an important part of our communication and an outlet to express ourselves and be creative! Stationery is all these things and should be an important consideration when sitting down to write a friend a letter. After all, letter-writing is an art and the stationery is the canvas!

Discount stores can often offer decorated stationery at budget prices, or you can create your own! Use stickers, rubber stamps and even cut outs from a magazine and a glue stick to embellish your plain or colored pages. Be creative!

Remember doing potato stamps in grade school? This can be an inexpensive way to create an interesting background or margin pattern on your letters.

If you can draw, a little doodle in a pretty colored ink can add an accent to the corners of your page. Use pinking shears to fancy-up the edges of plain colored paper.

Digital photos of yourself, your home, your yard and places around your city or town can be printed on your computer and added to plain stationery or used to create your own computer stationery.

Envelopes usually come with store-bought stationery, but for your own you will need pretty colored envelopes. You can make envelopes out of any kind of pretty paper - just observe how a store-bought envelope is folded. A few tries with your own squares of paper and you will find it’s not that difficult to create one. On a busy pattern, a white label can be used for the address.

Stationery stores or anywhere that cards are sold often have a surplus of colored envelopes. If you ask you can sometimes get a bunch for free, as they often get overloaded with them. These card envelopes are great because you can match the colors with the stationery you are using and they are large enough to hold FBs and other enclosures easily.

And don’t forget to decorate your envelope! As long as the design doesn’t block the address, it is fine to decorate envelopes, and it makes them fun to get. Who wouldn’t like to find a colorful decorated envelope amongst their daily dose of BILLS!?

So don’t settle for plain paper and boring envelopes, spend the extra time to create an artful letter, and enjoy yourself in the process. You will feel great when you pop that creative letter in the box and your friends will appreciate it too!