January letterboxing...

No worries, I'm still here. Loving the lack of snow and the balmy temperatures; hating that I didn't get to take advantage of it. C'est la vie.

 

Life has been pretty hectic so far in 2013, and though my blog posting may have been pushed (forced?) to the bottom of the list, I assure you my letterboxing activities have continued unabated.

 

As of this weekend, I have four letterboxes sitting on my credenza just waiting to be planted. I've been carving up a storm and have now transferred images for my contribution to this year's Coaster Boaster down in the greater Buffalo area (here's hoping that my renewed passport returns to me soon).

 

Turns out the printer at work is beautiful for transfers - thank goodness. (I mean, that should have been a condition of my employment, really.) As a matter of fact, it actually gives up its toner a little too easily. When I finally tried this particular printer, at least two days after I printed on this particular piece of paper, the xylene made the toner leak right off of the page. Xylene may be a little too strong, so I've resorted to my iron - works fantastically. And, as I found out, it is a colour laser printer - which also transfers amazingly. And with that feature, I'm going to try out my first(ish) layered stamp. More to come on that!

 

I've also got quite a number of other things in the queue: my Sweetheart Transfers minimeet  (ironically, these are printed, but not transferred yet), my L&B XV contributions, some stamps unrelated to letterboxing (sad, I know), and stamps for about 10 planned letterboxes.

Still plugging away!

 

Hope everyone is enjoying the warm weather!

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...

Book binding and holiday cards...

So, I've been making my own holiday cards for a while now, and I've been keeping my favourite cards for longer still.  And the question had always remained, what to do with the cards after the holiday/event? Throw them in a drawer? A box? Recycle them?

My first book of Christmas cards.

Then while learning to bind my own books for logbooks, I came across something that stuck with me - just as you fold signatures for binding, each card is sort of like a little card-stock signature of its very own and therefore easily bound. Somewhere I saw how someone had taken their cards and bound them into books.  I can't remember for the life of me where I saw this - it might be in one of my books or I might have seen it online.  Credit is due somewhere, but it's not with me.

So this is my first attempt to bind up my cards.  I got some really beautiful ones this year and like that they are now in a book that I can shelve and perhaps bring out to look at if the mood strikes me.  It only took three episodes of Big Bang Theory to complete, so just over an hour.  If you can bind a book, you can bind yours too. 

Here's the stuff.  Beautiful carved images at the top, rest of my cards all around, and the stamps I carved to make my own cards this year on the left.

I used my own stamps on the cover - I forgot to keep any of the cards for myself this year, or rather, I ran out of cards and actually had to use purchased ones for some.

Bound and standing on their own. I ordered the cards from short to tall to make the book more easily flipped.  The cards each have a unique width so being able to see the next larger one behind it is nice.

Finished and on the coffee table.  My supervisor worked so hard that she here is enjoyed a well-deserved nap.

Happy trails!

Last possible letterbox day of the year: thwarted.

So I'm currently standing at 390 finds and thought it would be lovely to end the year at 400.  How nice would that be?  I pulled together a whole bunch of clues for Kitchener-Waterloo, packed all my letterboxing stuff, and headed out this morning.

Well, I made it only about as far as Dixie Road exit on the 401 before I turned around.  I decided to give up after seeing 10 cars that had spun out along the highway and on/off ramps.  Ten is the magic number.  Drove home.

It was sad.  I really wanted to get a couple of new boxes... The boxes I would have been hunting were by a range of different letterboxers, some known to me, some not.  Damned snow.

Well, then back at home, sipping spiked coffee (hey! it's still holidays for me!) and carving up some new stuff.

Snowy trails!

Back in the saddle...

Spoilery, yes.  But only part of a larger image.

It's good to be carving again.  I'm moved in, settled, found all of my letterboxing paraphernalia, and am getting around to carving some images that I transferred a long time ago - Back in the Burlington days, actually. (I should probably stop transferring en masse - what happens is that I lose motivation with the specific images and then never carve them.  Then the rubber just sits in limbo.)

Hope you're all finding time to carve over the holidays!

Happy trails!

Happy Boxing Day!

Whatever your religous background, I believe any reader of this blog can agree to celebrate one particular day of the year: Boxing Day.

It has been well established that Boxing Day is the one day of the year that people from across the commonwealth gather together to celebrate the great hobby of letterboxing.  And so I'm just popping in to leave some cheer with the traditional Boxing Day poem:

May your trails be clear, 
With some clues for nearby.
May your boxes be clean,
And your logbooks all dry.

May your material be firm,
And your gouges be sharp.
Your transfers detailed,
And your carve on the mark.

May your boxing be wonderful,
Both near and afar,
Find lots in the New Year --
Wherever you are.

Wishing you and yours a wonderful Boxing Day. Sip some seriously spiked nog for me.

Lots of love,
Bumble

Just checking in...

Well, it's been a long time since I've posted here.  There probably won't be too many more posts before the end of the year (if any). But here's a quick update of my travels:

• I've moved to downtown Toronto.  Mostly everything is unpacked, but I just can't find where I put things.  Case in point: I know where my OZ Cut is, can't find my gouges.  Little hard to do any carving in those circumstances...

Supervising the moving process.  Also can't find the gouges.

• I bought one of those Helmer drawer sets for my letterboxing stuff.  I saw them in an Ikea a while ago and thought the shallow drawers and mobility of the thing would be perfect for my letterboxing stuff in my new apartment.  I was right, it's perfect.  Problem: Ikea is discontinuing them.  So go buy one asap! I was told what is on shelves is what is left...

• Also, I live right near the Ikea that poor little Darwin went to visit.  I think a letterbox commemorating that is in order.  Stay tuned in the new year. 

Also, the Burlington Teen Tour Band finishing up the Niagara on the Lake Parade...

• The marching season is over.  No more parades for me this year - luckily the weather was pretty good for all of them, so I haven't lost any fingers to frost bite. 
• My Christmas cards are finally done and going out.  I carved my own again this year - three different stamps, two from images, two that I carved freehand (into my last bit of that awful crumbly stuff - now it is gone!). 

This year's cards, free hand carves on the last bit of the crumbly stuff.

Anyways, I'm off.  Christmas plans to plan, need to clean my new place, and getting prepped for a new job in the new year.  Oh, and I guess I also have to do some Christmas shopping.  Gotta go, busy.

Happy trails!

Fun, fabulous, functional fonts

Probably the most difficult thing I've had to learn to carve is text.  Somehow, when carving regular images, I feel like there is a lot of leeway given in the interpretation of the object that I'm carving.  When I carve some bad lines in an image, my brain interprets everything properly when everything is stamped up and things often look better than the disaster my fatalistic brain has come up with.

However, with text, there really is no leeway. My brain has been hardwired for reading and will notice even the faintest improper wiggle in the lines.  I guess a lot of other people feel that way too and because of that they are intimidated from taking on something with text.

But, my advice would be, carve it anyway! You'll only get better at it!  Carve more! Practice makes perfect!

I remember going and finding a Fiddleheads carve out in the wild that had some text on it that completely blew me away.  I had to learn to do that...

The thing is, you're only setting yourself up for sadness if you use default computer fonts for your carvings.  Here's why: default fonts that come pre-installed with whatever software you're using (such as Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, etc) are meant for dense writing on paper and huge amounts of text. The fonts are meant for printers printing at 500 dot per inch.  The individual glyphs are tiny, thin, well nuanced, and essentially not well-suited for carving.  Can they be carved? Yes, by really talented carvers, at large sizes, etc.

That's not me.  I need to carve good lookin' text and not have the letters be giant.  And let's face it, default fonts are boring.  I work all day with Times New Roman and Cambria. Gag.  No more, thanks.  Where's my freedom of creative expression?

Oh.  Free fonts, you say?

DISCLAIMER: BY READING THE REST OF THIS POST, YOU MAY LOSE TIME, SLEEP, AND MAY END UP WITH A HUGE BACK-LOG OF CARVING TO BE COMPLETED.  BY READING THE REMAINDER OF THIS POST, YOU HEREBY WAIVE ALL RIGHTS BY YOU, YOUR HEIRS AND/OR SUCCESSORS FROM ANY CLAIMS, RESULTS, OR DAMAGES INCURRED BY THE GRATUITOUS AND WANTON GORGING UPON FONTS.  YOU HAVE BEEN HEREBY WARNED.

There's nothing like a new font to get your creative juices going.  As much as I wander through the depths of Google Images looking for pretty pictures to carve, I probably spend even more time wandering through the depths of free font sites, finding inspiration at every turn. You need fat fonts, not necessarily round - but big black ones that are conducive to carving even when tiny.

I remember in the lead up to Box ON! deciding that I was concerned that there weren't going to be that many boxes out for the event and that people were going to be climbing all over one another at the box locations.  Coming up with a way to slow people down and increase the number of boxes was achieved one day while wandering through fonts: why not carve labels for each of the boxes with both the name of the mysterious location and the carver?

I found the perfect font for it: Rapscallion.  I liked the font so much that I used it on the map for the event as well (you can check that out here). I also found a number of icon fonts for the glyphs I used to mark the locations of the boxes on that map.  Essentially, that map was one big ol' font fest.

Seriously, if you're not a technically inclined person, don't fret about installing new fonts on your computer.  Whether you have a PC or a Mac, it's super easy, there are great instructions at DaFont here.

I spend most of my time at DaFont, but here's a great list of free font websites to check out:

• Dafont - my favourite site, spend a lot of time here - check out in particular the section on "Dingbats" - lots of great carving images, no editing required.
• 1001FreeFonts - great site, some great fat black fonts that are good for carving.
• Creamundo - many nights have been lost in this website
• Action Fonts - also has a great dingbat section, I particularly like their Alien Symbols 

I'm sure there are a lot other great places to get fonts... I'm inspired now and my carving materials are still buried in my packed stuff.  Grr. What was I thinking?

Anxiety.

So, in the middle of moving to a new apartment in the City, done in the middle of changing jobs, in the middle of packing, in the middle of saying goodbyes, in the middle of hearings, in the middle of the Christmas season, in the middle of life... I'm anxious about the fact that I have packed my carving stuff and can't get at it for at least a week.

Ugh.

One more week to go and I'll be moved; one more month to go and I'll be in a new job. My trail name should have been Gypsy Jo.

On the road again...

Letterboxing in Key West, Florida

 

Key West is my Moby Dick.

When I first learned about letterboxing and before I ever went out on my first letterboxing adventure, I thought - cool, I bet I could do this travelling... I wonder if there are any letterboxes in that place I just got back from - Key West.  And there were.  At all the places I visited.  I was a little irritated that I didn't know about letterboxing and that I didn't get a chance to go find them.

So, flash forward a couple years to a time when my marching band gets invited for a festival in Key West.  Awesome.  It is on.  Those boxes are so mine.

I didn't have a lot of time in KW, but I had some great letterboxing times.  Some beautiful boxes are down in Key West!  So I rented a moped (what fun!) and headed out for a wonderful day of boxing!

The hens and roosters really were everywhere!

On the whole, the letterboxes in Key West were great.  Good hides, nice carves, and wonderful logbooks.  The logs were really interesting because I think a lot of other boxers come through on vacation, so there were some really interesting entries in the logs, and plenty of them.

Cock of the Walk was amazing in this regard because it was an older box with many, many entries.  I loved reading through them.

Key West apparently passed a law almost 100 years ago forcing the release of chickens that were being used in cock-fights.  Not sure of this, couldn't confirm online... But in any event, there are hens and roosters roaming freely all over the island and there are municipal laws prohibiting anyone from molesting the chickens.  Molesting.  Moving on.

I particularly liked the magnetic box that I found at Bo's - where I stopped for some delicious food and a few drinks.  Bo's broken down truck was fantastic - and I remember seeing it last time I was down. I actually didn't find the box on my own, mostly because I have issues sticking my hands in places potentially hiding spiders.  Ick.  Fortunately, a brave noxer I was with was not similarly afflicted and found the box for me.  Awesome. Drinks all around.

Later, I found what I think might be my favourite letterbox to date: it was in the cemetery in Key West - a place that specifically prohibits letterboxes - so I'm not posting the box link here.  With any small of amount of sleuthing, you'll find it.  Fantastic cemetery, with lots of amazing sights.  The hide was fantastic - I loved it.  Location - not style of hide, which was fairly typical.  I don't want to spoil it for future finders, so I won't comment other than to say this one gets my solid seal of approval.  The stamp was great and the log was facinating.  The cemetery had many beautiful sights and I left a box of my own.  Huge lizards abound, and I actually found a toad inside a toad abode.  So cool.

A toad abode...

With a toad.

So here it is: Key West Cemetery prohibits letterboxing. But geocaching is allowed? I would have loved to be at city council when this ordinance was passed. Maybe one day I'll hunt down the staff report recommending this... This is crazy.

I visited Hemingway House to find the Hemingway Cat box... Cat with thumbs? They're trying to take over the world!

These cool trees make interesting places to hide boxes...

The festival was great... This is probably the most tame picture I took and the only one that I would post on a blog for what is often a family based activity...

Thanks Key West!