Thanks for all of your thoughts and comments on Tuesday’s post! We will definitely continue the conversation on making art and being creative when we also have to live in the real world of jobs, families, and commitments of all sorts. I’ve already been thinking of where to start our conversation…
In the meantime, I wanted to share images from Swap Day in the Liberate Your Art postcard swap, Sunday March 13. This is the day everything comes together! Postcards are swapped and readied for mailing.
It all starts with a pile of envelopes!
Before swap day arrives, I open each envelope and make sure it has everything it needs: Postcards with a personal message, stamps and address labels. I remove any paper clips, extra postcards, extra envelopes, nice notes to me, etc. so that I know each envelope is ready to swap. It goes into my magical red boxes, one box for US participants and one box for international.
Next I lay out the envelopes around the house, interleaving the international participants with the US participants. In past years, every one swapped with an international participant, but we didn’t have enough this year. Next year, recruit your friends outside of the US!
Next comes the actual swapping! I take the postcards, stamps and labels out of each envelope and lay them on top. Each set of postcard is distributed to the five envelopes to the right of it. Hopefully the video helps make sense of the process!
All of this I do on my own, early in the morning before the helpers arrive. My cat Roman supervises, but our dog is not let anywhere near this process! I do this alone because I’ve learned (the hard way) that it requires close attention to make sure the swap sequencing is not messed up. You don’t want one stack of postcards with too many and other stacks with too few. Fixing problems like that can be a challenge, especially if multiple people are working on this at the same time. This takes about 2 to 3 hours, if you don’t include the time spent on social media trying to post along the way.
At 10am, the helpers arrived for the sticking and stacking! This year’s helpers:
Top, left to right: Jeannette, Sue, Marcella
Bottom, left to right: Jana, Deb, Mark
Not pictured: Dorothy
Then, for the next couple of hours, we all stick on stamps and labels!
Thanks to Jana, my hand model, for showing the process!
It could be tedious work, but it goes quickly with the help. We chat along the way, commiserate on labels that don’t peel well, and get to sneak a peek at the art after the work is done! All of the helpers left with a nice stack of bonus postcards, thanks to participants who sent extra.
We finished in record time. Partly because of the experienced crew, and partly because there were fewer participants this year.
But here they all are, six stacks ready to go!
Two mailings have been sent already, on Monday and Thursday, so postcards are arriving at their final destinations.
Success! Art is Liberated! We will have the final celebration / blog hop in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
