My top five...

This is a purely self-indulgent post.  Purely.  You should leave now if you don't want to hear me rambling about my favourite letterboxes from my own collection of plants.  Yep. Just leave.

I've recently hit 200 letterbox hides.  If you look at my online log at AQ, it might indicate otherwise, but there are various reasons for that.  Nevertheless, I've hit 200 and just wanted to look back at some of my favourites from my own collection of boxes.

My top five favourite clues:

1. The Numbers Station - runner up, The Numbers Station: Atencion.  Why?  It's my audio clue, that's why.  Little puzzley, not as hard as people might think it is.  I put a lot of work into these - still a little sad that not many others have found them, hence why I planted another in the US.
2. The Devil's Advocate.  Not really killing the mystery that this alias is one of mine. Why? There are bits of clues everywhere and you have to sort them all out to get enough clue to find this one.  Really fun, I think.
3. The Purloined Letter.  Why?  The clue took me a lot of digital skills to make, but to crack the clue takes a mere second once you catch on.  I'm not as big a fan as cipher clues as I am steganographic ones, and this one ranks high for me.
4. Letterbox Cliche.  A recent plant - this one had germinated during discussions with Vivian the Viking and Starhexen about terrible clues.  Again, I love me some steganography.
5. Hic Sunt Dracones.  I love maps, so I made one of my own.  I still have the hard copy of this - I hand drew this map and the clue online is just a scan of it.  Perhaps I should frame it or something...

My top five favourite hiding spots:

1. Polar Bear, Polar Bear. Why? In the side of a building, that's why.
2. Toronto Skyline. Why? Although it's a very basic carve, I really love where I've placed this one.  It's in a tiny key-holder on the back of a greenhouse sign.  It's still there any no one has discovered it.  Crazy.
3. Whoooooo Are You Looking For? Why? One box part of my first series, this was in a magnetic canister in plain view.  I still haven't been able to do that since.  However, the box itself fell apart and rolled down a ravine.  Ooops.
4. Annandale House.  Why? I know some people don't like (read: hate) planter's pouches, but sometimes, with a perfect spot...
5. I'm Just a Worm. Why? I gorgeous old stone house - in ruins - hides this little guy, which is the perfect Labyrinth tie-in. Was 'cached once, might have happened again, but I refuse to relocate...

My top five favourite carvings:

1. And a Bottle of Rum.  Why? I left this one down in Key West last year and wanted to leave something well carved in my wake.  This image was super-fun and I used the stamp in an earlier post about ink qualities.
2. A Touch of Voodoo.  Why?  Sometimes you just find a perfect image to carve who's subject is perfect and style matches your carving technique.  The clue and the hide where so-so, so I can only imagine it was the carve and the logbook that earned this box the purple diamond.  
3. Legendary White Squirrel.  Why? Not really a hard carve, but I love how the whole thing came together.
4. James Perrot.  Why?  Hasn't been found by anyone yet, but this one was sent to We Live & Breathe Letterboxing XV and will hopefully be making a return trip to be permanently planted in Ontario.  Lots of work went into this one.
5. The Merchants of Florin. Why? I just found images I loved and they turned into a great mini series.  

My top five favourite locations:

1. Albion Falls.  Why?  One of my very first letterboxes, this one was planted in Hamilton at one of the most amazing waterfalls.  It truly must be seen to be believed.
2. Siste, Viator: Key West. Why?  One of my favourite letterboxes (by someone else) is planted in this same area and something truly marvelous to go see.
3. The Scottish Letterbox. Why?  Stratford is so lovely, I wanted to leave a box in a quiet spot that should be protected.  It wasn't.  Seems it might be gone already.  Sheesh.
4. That Old Tin Can. Why? I love the Distillery District in Toronto and wanted to place a box that would help others -particularly visitors - discover this cute area.  Mission accomplished.
5. The Hawthorne.  Why? Actually planted in a historic hotel in an amazing little City.  One of my favs, even though it didn't last long (nor did I expect it to).

My top five international boxes:

1. The Hawthorne.  Why? My first box planted internationally, in Salem, Massachusetts. 
2. Sunny Days. Why? I planted this one while on a trip to Myrtle Beach.  In my view, it was a poor hide, but nonetheless I ended up with a steady list of finders until the wooden staircase it was under was replaced.
3. Love in Suraksan.  Why?  Although I suspect this box will never be found by a letterboxer, this is certainly the farthest away I can get from home to plant.  The image is a heart around a maple leaf and part of the Korean flag as well.  Great memories from an amazing trip.
4. And a Bottle of Rum. Why?  A great carve as indicated in my favourite carves list, but just a great box all around.  According to the finders, it would appear that it is not hidden where I left it and has been moved around quite a bit.  Sigh.  But I still love this one.
5. Get Your Geek On. Why? I love Comic Con.  And I'm such a big nerd. And letterboxing is quite nerdy as well.  Putting that all together? I don't even care that this one got just a few finds before disappearing...

My top five all-round favourites:

1. The Numbers Station 
2. The Devil's Advocate
3. The Merchants of Florin  
4. Letterbox Near a Postbox
5. The $1 Tour of Hamilton

BONUS: My top three worst boxes:

1. The Suits. Why? Quick carves on the back of erasers, not well done.  Little duct tape pouches which were easily lost.  No connection of the theme to location.  All around pretty sucky.
2. Bottoms Up. Why? This one was carved - poorly - on a mounted lino block. Uh. 
3. Little House in the City. Why?  Well, really, what was I thinking?  Ugh.  Glad it only had one finder.

Goodbye 2012... Another year in letterboxing

Goodbye, 2012.  What a wonderful year you were. In 2012, I found 151 boxes (down 50 from the year before), and planted 67 - weirdly, the same as the year before.  The vast majority of those were for Box ON!. I hosted a mini meet and the big Ontario meet, I crossed the border multiple times for events and regular letterboxing, and was in my first car accident.

My favourite plant would be Love in Suraksan - mostly because it's never been found and probably never will be, but it's my little seed of hope on the other side of the globe.  Only found once is my And a Bottle of Rum box down in Key West, a fun letterbox.

My favourite find this year was the Hockley Valley Hitchhiker Chalet by trailfeathers. The find doesn't stick out for me, but the age and history of this beastie really did it for me. This box dates back to 2007 and had some amazing Ontario letterboxing history in its pages.  It had sat for a while before I got up there; it's pretty far out of the way for most of the existing boxers in this province, but was a beautiful find anyway.  I had a great letterboxing day the day I found this one and this box in particular did it for me.

Despite my own personal downswing in finds, this blog has really picked up.  I've posted over 100 posts this year, and I'm getting a lot of traffic from Google.  A good chunk from Atlas Quest, but lots from Google. Weird. But I'm not here to make money from this blog, just wanting to post about my adventures and maybe inspire others to take a walk in the woods.  I've been stalking other blogs and am happy that Ms. Viking has really gotten blogging as well.

I'm looking forward to some great letterboxing in 2013 - and in particular to We Live & Breathe in Massachewsetts Massachusets Massachewbackasetts Massachusetts.  And I'm also looking forward to spelling Massachusetts correctly the first time I type it.

Anyways, I hope everyone has had a great year and I look forward to seeing you on the trails in 2013...

The 100 Box Roundup: Part 2

Now, where were we?

 This continues from an earlier post...

Off to my first full letterboxing event down in St. Thomas, and planted Annandale House on my way home in Tillsonburg. Had no idea where/how to plant it before getting there, so I brought with me planter’s pouches and different sized Lock N’ Locks to respond to whatever I found. Found a great little spot in the porch, and Bob’s your uncle. This image was designed by yours truly by manipulating a full colour image. I was surprisingly happy with the outcome.

Next, I planted a series I had carved for a Joss Whedon LTC swap – Can’t Stop the Signal.  I loved doing the carvings, but I’m really not cut out to be an LTC person. That was the last LTC ring I did – likely the last I’ll ever do.

The Purloined Letter letterbox was one I put together after putting some research into cryptography. I am terrible at ciphers. And you know what? I also don’t like doing them. Hypocritical since I have some cipher-based boxes that I planted subsequent to this one… But this one doesn’t have even a lick of cipher in it – steganography all the way. Loved putting this image together. It really does tie into Edgar’s story… I’m sad this box hasn’t had more finds.

Next were some bugs to go along with carves by the immeasurably talented Fiddleheads and her Up the Garden path set of series to go in the Royal Botanical Gardens.  Even after some great hides, a couple of hers went missing pretty quickly after planting, which is sad. But I love RBG and will definitely get back out there for some more planting, methinks.

With a lot of planning, and learning to use software on my computer I never use, I put together the audio clue for Numbers Station and planted the box. I’m sad there’s only two finders on this box, because it’s my personal favourite and I put my heart and soul into the box. I put together the audio clue using Garage Band on my laptop… I found some great audio tracks for static online (who knew?), actually played the tune of Yankee Doodle that you hear using my keyboard, put together the clue and read it myself. Yes, that’s me in the recording. I put on that voice to sound more like real numbers stations to make it real creepy. Mixed the music, the various static tracks, and submitted it to the very friendly Jackbear for the Letterpod.

Next up, I designed a large touristy stamp for Hamilton which I cut up and hid all over the City for a series called The $1 Tour of Hamilton.  Perhaps I’m psychic, because in the course of carving and planting this box, I ended up being offered a job on the other side of the GTA that I couldn’t turn down, making this series one of the last I was able to plant before I moved and hitting some of the places I wanted to get to before I left. I really like this series, but I think the length of the journey to get all of these boxes may be a deterrent from finders going after these ones. Hope not, this is my favourite series and worth the search.

As a treat for myself after this move, I bought myself one of those table-mounted lighted magnifiers to help with the fine carving – and what a difference it made! The better carvings, along with my new-found desire to make nice logbooks, is what I think made A Touch of Voodoo  into a purple diamond box. Thanks everyone for your very generous ranking!

OPAL 2012 encouraged me to do some more library boxes, and for this year I made some new self-enclosed magnetic library letterboxes for a Whodunit series for Holmes, Poirot, Marple, and Drew. I should note that back here on the author’s side of this blog I can see that my post on the making of that logbook has the most views of any of the non-clue posts. I guess folks like how-to posts… I’ll get on that!

After finding Fiddleheads’ most excellent night letterbox, Looking for Night (and being totally creeped out by the sounds a cedar forest makes at night), I decided to try my hand at some urban night boxes. That led to By Moonlight being planted on the main drag of Unionville. Difficult stamps to carve, since they are mostly positive space, and I think harder to stamp with to get a clear image. Something I hope to improve on in the future.

Water trickling down the mountain - Suraksan, Seoul, South Korea

Next, I flew to Seoul, Korea, to have a lovely time with my sister, and couldn’t help but plant a box while there, Love in Suraksan.  It was a beautiful and charming place, and really, a letterboxer’s paradise in terms of urban/forest hides since there are mountains right in the middle of town – but very few letterbox clues that I could find. Still no finds on this one, and quite frankly, I only ever really expect that I will get one attempt on it and then it will be lost in the sands of time. But in the unlikely – but not impossible – chance that I can contribute to a developing letterbox culture there, I’m more than happy to do so :)

So, on the flip side of that visit, I came home with a cute store-bought stamp. I know, I know. But it was cute! And it was a cat! And it pretty much summed up my trip! So, together with some other touristy ephemera, this stamp has been planted in my nearby library as a Korean Souvenier. C’mon. You’ll likely end up at that library for other boxes anyway. Don’t bust my chops.

Finally, at 98, I knew I wanted to do a cute little pair of boxes that would be perfect to round out my first 100. Guarding is a pair of boxes containing Kyoke and Nishibi, guardians of the location(s?). I was happy to again put together another visual clue and am working on a couple others for the future.

So that sums up those first 100 boxes… Hope you enjoy finding them as much as I do planting them!

The 100 Box Roundup: Part 1

So, as of May 5, 2012, I have planted 100 letterboxes – under two years. I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about some of the boxes, my favourites, my not-so-favourites, and the why-the-heck-did-I-plant-thats. But, since there are so many, two posts – the next will come in a couple days.

My very first letterbox, Letterbox Near a Postbox, was planted only two days after I learned about letterboxing. Not too long after I planted it, the Oakville Museum folks commenced some renovation work, and hoisted that post office up on stilts – exposing my little letterbox to the world. Let me tell you, it nearly put me off of letterboxing all together. But, a kind soul let me know and I was able to get the box back from museum staff and replant nearby. Whenever I get find reports on this one, I feel warmth way down in my heart.  It's an old one, but I love it.

The second letterbox I planted was Toronto Skyline,which is a thumb-nail sized stamp in a magnetic key box inside Allen Gardens in Toronto. I put it there while visiting my sister who at the time lived kitty-corner across the street. She’d never been inside before, nor had I, so we spent an afternoon exploring and left this little fella.

The third box I planted after work one day – Albion Falls.  It was the first box I ever had a blue diamond on, though I only had it for a month. It’s not a great carve, done on that horrid Speedy-Cut material, the clue was generic and the logbook was probably not thought through, but the location was stellar. I had never been there before, but was encouraged to go visit by some coworkers. So I carved and prepped a box and off I went.

I had a great time, but again, I was in nice work clothes at the time. As in, I was dressed for court. So, while planting the box, a great big mutt came running up to me from along the creek bed, and throws muddy paws up on my chest, and planted a big wet pouch smooch on me. I have this effect on dogs. Horrified, the pouch’s non-English speaking owners stared at me wide-eyed, likely thinking this crazy lady in a suit would throw a fit now that her suit was covered in mud. I thought it was hilarious. Seriously – what business did I have being in a suit next to a waterfall and creek on the Bruce Trail? I laughed, gave the pooch a hearty snuggle and responded to them in my broken Spanish that it was not a problem, gave their lovely dog a final smooch and off I went. The dry-cleaner was not as impressed.

Hamilton is the City of Waterfalls as it has more waterfalls than any other place on the planet.  I had wanted to plant some more waterfall boxes, but other than a couple, I wasn't that successful. 

Albion Falls, Hamilton Ontario - Gorgeous waterfall and a letterbox, what more could you ask for?

The first letterbox I put together that I really loved was my Redundant Ministry letterbox. The carving, of a silhouette of John Cleese from the classic Ministry of Silly Walks skit, is now likely missing. But I had a terrible time planting this box. I was still relatively green in the box planting department and naively thought that it wouldn’t be hard to find a hidey spot in Queen's Park. Hah!

The first time I really put any sort of effort into my carvings was with my Little Prince and Fox duo. I took images right out of the book to use and finally realized how crappy SpeedyCut is to work with. I still had some of it left, so I used it up for further stamps, but that was about the time I finally put in an order to Stampeaz. That first set of stuff didn’t arrive until December that year, so I continued to use up my stash of SpeedyCut and started using vinyl erasers from Dollarama for some of my following boxes.


Then, that first fall, I went with friends and family down to Salem, Massachusetts, for the October Hallowe’en festivities. I had stayed there before at the Hawthorne Hotel and knew I wanted to plant a letterbox there. So, I set out to carve what was then a seemingly insurmountable task: to carve the Hawthorne capitol. I did it. On SpeedyCut. (shudder). The stamp lived a very short life inside the Hotel on the 3rd floor. I received some awesome responses for that box before the maids made it disappear, and a blue diamond before it retired.

Finally, I got a great shipment of a variety of carving material from Webfoot in the mail, got to work and planted a number of boxes using the various materials I tested: But They’re Starving on my first try with FirmCut, The Lorax with my first bit of SpeedyCarve, Bottoms Up! on a linoleum block, and Sunny Memories on a hunk of MasterCarve (my least favourite carving medium, by the way).

Once I got a feel for the carving materials, it really was the Literary Cats series that I felt I really started to figure out how to carve. I put the images together myself and put quite a bit of time into each of them over a weekend and planted them in the then newly renovated Hamilton library.  My neck hurt like crazy following this, but I still am really happy with those carvings. Today, those would take me no time at all to carve, but at the time it took me forever.

Soon after, I flew to Calgary to meet up with a pair of good friends who lived there. No boxes to be found, but I did manage to leave one in a provincial park there – Fish Creek. The carving matched the location, and I was really proud of that carve, but worried at the time that it would rarely be found. I shouldn’t have worried; despite the relative dearth of letterboxers in that area, there are a lot of travelers who have registered finds on this box. In the time since planting this box, I really have tried to seed empty areas as I travel – you never know who might pick up letterboxing because of your box. And I’m always delighted when someone seeds in my area.hinthint

Down By the Water was the first carving and letterbox I did where I felt that I had really figured out the material. I was really happy with the image I had found and how it translated. But it was at that point that I became unhappy with the actual letterbox itself – beyond the image (clue, location, etc) – and started plotting out new boxes that were more clue-driven.

Although at this point I had come up with some ideas for different clues, the Owl and the Pussycat  was the first puzzle box I tried and I’ve had a number of finders on.

Hic Sunt Dracones... Here Be Dragons

What I had actually been plotting was the clue for Hic Sunt Dracones – and actually, I had been plotting that particular clue all during the carve for the box. I loved the image I had found, it’s a fantastic woodcut from the era of nautical exploration, and wanted a great map clue to match the name and the image. I spent quite a bit of time sketching this map out with various features, then drew over it with different sized Sharpies. Was not entirely happy with how the lines turned out – I wish the map lines were the thinner ones and the words were thicker, but still it was done. Crumpled the whole thing up, soaked it in tea, tore it up a bit, then threw it in the oven to dry. Coloured it up a bit, scanned it, and voila – instant clue. I still have the map in amongst my letterboxing stuff at home, not sure what to do with it. From an aesthetic sense, I don’t love it, so I wouldn’t necessarily put it on the wall, but I don’t want to throw it out either. Maybe I’ll glue it into my logbook…

Happy (letter)Boxing day!

Yes, I'm Canadian, and yes, we have a holiday called Boxing Day, and no, I have no idea what Boxing Day is meant to celebrate.*  So it must mean that it is meant to celebrate letterboxing.  I will endeavour to update Wikipedia shortly.

In celebration of this underwhelming holiday, I present to you a tidy roundup of some recent blog posts of those I follow... Some may be letterboxing blogs, others, well, not so much ;)  Enjoy!

It's never too cold to box, go do some winterboxing: Brush and Barron: A little more chilly cheer.

A Krampus?  Yes, finally a Christmas demon in dire need of being carved: Black and White: Gruss vom Krampus.

Favourite winterboxing travelogue (though, minus a few points for lack of snow, plus a few points for noting that I screwed up my last letterbox search): Lone R: Letterboxing, Commuting and Chickadees.

If you can put the $$$ together, Dartmoor winterboxing: whoisthechallenger: When the going gets tough...

Favourite start-to-finish video carving tutorial, with a fantastic, festive result: eraser carving and printmaking: The process of eraser carving.

Hope everyone is having a safe and happy holiday!


*Although, secretly, I think the day is truly meant as a day to celebrate cardboard boxes. Because really, can you imagine a world without them? Just think about the awesome impact of the cardboard box on your life. All great things come out of boxes.  And so I wish you a very happy boxing day and may your boxing day be full of numerous and sufficiently square boxes.