Snail Mail Organisation – 2017

     Hey everyone. As you know, I am an avid snail mail fan. I’ve been writing and receiving letters for over a year and a half now and since starting, I’ve gotten quite a number of pen pals. With all the letters I get, I’ve needed to find a suitable way of storing them – it’s a problem every snail mailer faces!

     I started out with a shoe box but eventually that got too small and I needed a bigger one. TK Maxx is the store to go to if it’s nice boxes you’re looking for. That’s where I got mine last year and I made sure to get the biggest one I could. It looked pretty sad at first when I put my letters in there and there was so much empty space but I was thinking ahead – it’s important when coming up with a system of organisation that you build in room to expand!

     If you check out my post from last year about how I organise my snail mail, you’ll see that I had my letters from 2015 tied up in bundles by sender, and the letters from 2016 on the other side of the box, with a clip holding the letters from each pen pal to keep them altogether. It worked for a bit but at the start of this year I decided I needed to do a bit of reorganisation.

     I now have all of the letters from a pen pal together rather than separating the years. Each pen pal has a section with older letters to the back and newer letters to the front. Now it’s easy to quickly put letters away safely when I respond.

     It’s a fairly simple and somewhat rapidly put together system that I have going on here. The dividers are simply A5 pieces of card from a pack with sticky labels for tabs. I was literally just rummaging around my craft room for inspiration on what I could use to organise my box! For the middle divider, I cut a 12×12 piece of paper to size to fit, folded it in half and stuck it down with some washi tape.

     This is just something I did when I had a spare hour to kill. It’s not the prettiest an organisation system could be but it also wasn’t that time time-consuming or expensive to put together (a pack of A5 card that cost €1.50 and some sticker labels I already had?) so you get what you put it!

     By the way, in my box, I also have a section for lost pen pals – for when you write one or two letters but then never hear back from them. These are really the could have been pen pals. Things didn’t work out but I still can’t bear to throw out my letters!