Letterboxing: Winter Welcome Wagon Meet and Greet.

Letterboxing is a new/recent hobby of mine that I picked up a few months ago. Back in April, I was trying to find a Geocache, and my GPS device just couldn't zone in on the GZ.  I just tried to use my common sense and started looking around. I didn't find the Geocache, but I did stumble upon my first Letterbox.  It had been planted in the same area.

I opened the Letterbox, read it, wrote down some info from it, and tucked that info in my Geocache backpack.

A month later, I remembered my little jotted down notes, and pulled them out. I signed up for Atlasquest, one of the top Letterboxing communities in the United States, and started my journey through this exciting new hobby.

Letterboxing dates back to the 1800's in Britain, and there's a rich history of Letterboxing over in England.  Check out Silent Doug's great website about Letterboxing HERE. His website is a great FAQ full of the history, how to's, and more.

Letterboxing is the perfect hobby for me.  It's the combination of outdoors, hiking/walking/history tours, and Crafts!  One of the primary aspects of Letterboxing is hand carved stamps. You know if it involves handmade, I'm all about it!

But I'm not an artist, my Little Brother and my Birth Mom were the artists.. not me, I'm just crafty. How would I be able to design stamps?  With inspiration from Chinese Paper Cuts, Old wood carvings, and Illustrations from books in the Project Gutenberg project, I've been able to create some interesting stamps! Luckily, I'm not that bad of a sketcher, and I can always bring a 70's "pop" feel to my creations.



Last weekend, I had the opportunity to meet some local Letterboxers in my area.  So much of my life is spent interacting with people via the web, Social Media, instant message, not much IRL ("In Real Life") interaction. I had to trade some hours out to attend, and I was fashionably late, lol.

I attended the Winter Welcome Wagon Meet n' Greet in Virginia Beach, and got to meet some great people.

Me stamping another Letterboxer's stamp into my journal at the Winter Welcome Wagon!

I learned a few things about stamping, some history, met some awesome people, and also learned more about why Letterboxing is going to be one of my Favorite hobbies.  Quite a few people complimented me on my stamps, and could not believe that I've only been doing this since last May (Actually, I purchased my first stamp carving supplies in the end of May/beginning of June, lol!)

I've learned that Letterboxing is pretty involved, and encompasses a few smaller hobbies, like ACEO/ATC (Artist Trading Cards), and even Book-Binding!

Being the frugal person I am, I'll need to start prioritizing all my crafts, and figure out how I can get more involved in this without spending a whole lot of cash.  I've already started on binding my first book for letterboxing:



I'd like to network with a few other Letterboxers out there, and also see how Letterboxing is incorporated into their daily lives! So much of Letterboxing lends itself to other hobbies, like Geocaching, Scrapbooking, printmaking, it would be interesting to see what other crafters are also involved in this hobby.

Thanks for reading everyone!