A Surprise Wedding and the 52 Postcards That Followed • Carly Butler Verheyen
BY CARLY BUTLER VERHEYEN
Nothing about our wedding was ordinary. In fact, that morning I woke up thinking it was the day of our engagement party, but I got the surprise of a lifetime after reading a letter from my fiancé telling me that our engagement party that was planned for that day was actually our wedding day. While I was away for 6 months retracing the steps of my Grandmother's love letters in London, England, he was at home planning our big day. We had a date set the following year, so we were planning things together here and there, but little did I know that things we were planning were actually being moved to an earlier date: the date of our surprise wedding.
The surprise didn't end that night. The guests of our surprise wedding filled out postcards that had a number from 1 – 52 in the corner, and every week of our 1st year of marriage, a vintage postcard from one of our wedding guests came in the mail. Some of the guests took them home with them to fill out and send themselves, while others wrote a message that day or night and left it in a mailbox by the end of the night for our good friend to mail to us each week.
Some had marriage advice, some had memories of our wedding day, and others had drunken messages of love and well wishes. It was such a treat to feel the love from our wedding guests all year long.
A few of our faves are below.
The Spark of Resilience • A Handwritten Collaboration with LetterFarms
A Journey to Dream
We are wildly excited to announce that Handwritten has teamed up with LetterFarms for an epic celebration: the 85th anniversary of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the 11th president of India (2002 - 2007), and the one who inspired billions to dream big and fly high.
On October 15th, we'll be publishing 85 postcards from the year-long Dear Kalam Sir campaign, which is set to be the world's largest handwritten postcard tribute campaign for a public leader ever. With participants by tens of thousands from over 200 cities in India, the project was slated to end on July 27th, 2016, the anniversary of Dr. Kalam's death, yet the movement carries on: people continue to send in handcrafted tributes, and just two months ago, Bloombury published an anthology of the postcards, which chronicle the life and after-life of Dr. Kalam's impact worldwide.
Handwritten is excited to bring this project to a new level by curating an interactive exhibition: starting on October 15th and continuing throughout the end of the month, we'll be publishing 85 postcards containing Dr. Kalam's quotes about dreams and dreaming, but also live-publishing your responses to the images and inspiration. You'll see four categories of postcards — Spark, Resilience, Decision, and Take Off — all of which were foundational elements to Kalam sir's life and essence. If and when one speaks to you, tell us what it says by sending your creation to submit@handwrittenwork.com.
We hope that you will join us in celebrating and sharing the inspiration.
Keep the beautiful pens busy,
Handwritten + LetterFarms
In Review • International Handwriting Day 2016
On January 23rd, 2016, Handwritten celebrated National Handwriting Day by showcases international alphabets. We opened a call to hand-writers around the world, and received characters of all kinds, including invented alphabets, like the one above by writer and artist Tatiana Roumelioti. Halfway through the day, we even received four letters from The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, which are forthcoming in their new anthology Pen to Paper. Though we celebrate on this scale once a year, the pen party never stops. Enjoy the work we received below, and stay tuned for our celebration in 2017.
1. Creative Quotables.
2. Letters from The Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
3. Poems from around the world.
4. Invented, Real, Permanent, No Longer.
5. Messages of Love.
6. #BICDROP
What does seeing all this make you want to do? Hopefully, pick up a pen. But after such an incredibly fun and wide-reaching celebration of handwriting this past weekend, all we can think about doing is one giant #bicdrop. And thanks to our brilliant graphics design, Megan Sykes, for providing us with a way to express this feeling.
