book package

I like receiving presents in the mail...but I also like sending them. My dear friend Beth is a wildly artistic person with a great sense of humor, and someone I kept thinking about when I read Kathryn Stockett's funny and poignant The Help. (In a day and a half, mind you.) I loved the book so much, and I knew she would, too, so when I saw a great copy in a secondhand shop I had to snap it up and send it to her as a surprise.

I really like recycling vintage books that are damaged as wrapping paper, and for this I used Ramona Quimby, Age 8. The two drawings I chose for the front, Ramona and her father drawing their feet, and the Quimbys having a nutritious-but-off-putting dinner of tongue, are really appropriate for Beth. It's wrapped with striped yarn and a vintage Cracker Jack charm, and the postal lady nearly had a heart attack over how cute the padded envelope was adorned with stickers from The Small Object. I like to think of people smiling at the fat, cheerful package as it passed through their hands...perhaps it helped to get it safely across the country, too.