Letter Writing

I appreciate the lost art of writing letters and I would love to bring back. Unfortunately, I'm certain I cannot single-handedly do this. I will, however, give it my best shot with this fantastic idea.

The idea is to: Create & Customize Your Own Writing Paper - this is just a tumblr post, so here are the directions, as written on Pinterest:

To create “washed out” pictures, I copied and pasted a picture onto Word, selected “Format Picture,” selected “picture,” than under “image control” and “color” dropdown box, selected “washout.” Print and write your letter! This is amazing! 

Very simple idea, but having a Mac computer and a newer version of Word, some of my formatting options needed to be tweaked just slightly. Here are my slight changes: In order to format the picture to be the size you want it to be, you will want to start with the layout option as "in front of text." After you have sized it however you wish, I would go ahead and change the layout option to "through text." (That way, we can add a text box to it if we wanted!) 

The next thing I had to do was select "Picture Color Options" and in that box, select "Change Recolor Option to" and from there, changed it to "washout." From there, you can change the transparency options as well, if the picture is too dark. The first attempt I made, I used a color picture - a picture that had beautiful vibrant colors and all of us looking toward the camera. It did not translate well onto the paper - but you can see it worked! 

My recommendation would be to use a black and white picture with strong lines or maybe go with something artsy, without direct contact with a face - if that makes sense.  Like this one that was taken nearly 6.5 years ago when I married the man of my dreams. 

This picture seemed to work way better! I printed it out for my husband and wrote him a little note - but the note part of it has been fuzzed out. That's for his eyes only. :)

One more thing - did you know, you can type on the same paper?! Now, I realize that loses a little of the personalized appeal due to lack of your own hand-writing. But, how cool is this?! All you have to do is - once your picture has been changed to "through text" - insert a text box and starting typing to your heart's content.

There's no rule that says you have to use lined paper either. In fact, the lined paper was a tad (very tad...like, barely noticeable tad) difficult because it was smaller than my printer paper drawer sizing. It did work, obviously, but it isn't an absolute must other than the cuteness factor of it.

So, here's a challenge for all of us: let's all write a personalized letter today and make it elegantly or cheesily our own. Whoever receives a lovely hand-written (or typed) picture-personalized note will be ever-so happy to have received it and you may just brighten someone's day! 

Now if you'll excuse me; I'm going to go write some more letters on my fancy new personalized stationary.