The QWERTY Bird

Step one. Go to Ikea and build one of theirs. It’s probably easier, faster, and way less frustrating than what we did.

Step two. It will NOT be as awesome as ours. Good things come to those who wait, scream, yell, and then go to bed in tired and terrible impatience, just to get up and do it all again the next day.

Step two. Clean your window boxes. Window boxes? Yes. Window boxes. We had a great idea. Build beautiful pine window-boxes. So we can plant them to decorate our wedding hall and save money on flowers. Then we can reuse them to build a beautiful mid-century bookshelf after the wedding. We used pine planks, finishing nails, and chocolate brown waterproof stain to build 12 beautiful window-boxes which we then planted with alyssum, cosmos, pansies, forget-me-nots, geraniums, delphiniums, and violas, and bordered our dance floor with them.

Step two. Wait two years. If you die in the between time, use the pine boxes to bury yourself. If not in a cemetery, in the giant pile of window boxes that is now sitting unused in the middle of your tiny rented flat.

Step two. Use Murphy’s Oil Soap. It works very very well. We put all the window boxes in the kitchen, swept out all the dust, dirt and hay with a tiny whisk broom and dustpan. Pour a very liberal half cup in a gallon of hot water. Take a microfiber cloth and start wiping down. It made our boxes come out looking brand new and freshly stained.  

Step three. Come up with a design. Actually, come up with ten designs of how to stack them. Show each one to your husband only to have him say, “I don’t like that bit.” Don’t waste your time with blue print websites though. After spending hours on blue print websites trying to learn them, I went back to Microsoft word. I inserted a rectangle into Word, made it the right proportions, copied and pasted it eleven times, and voila, in Word, you can move shapes, flip them, rotate them and generally move them wherever you damn well feel like. You can even adjust the screen size so you scale the measurements for when you are assembling the pieces.

Step four. Play Giant-Jenga-With-Hazards—I mean build the bookshelf—in your kitchen. Don’t leave your husband to do the work he knows how. Get in his way at every point possible, with methods he should try because you know better. Even better, insist that he freeze in awkward positions while he is using a screwdriver so you can take photos for your blog. Also, because his bum is very nice and round, and you like it.

Step five. Buy dinner. Justify the extra expense outside your budget because you worked so damn hard at arguing and holding things in place for the whole afternoon.

Step six. Let the entire project gather dust for six months while you try to track down a set of sixteen-inch mid-century tapered dowel legs. Give up. Set your husband the task of making some.

Step seven. Get the entire thing done, realise you need to make just one more cut, and call a friend to bring you over a handsaw in the middle of the night.

Step eight. Paint the sitting room, buy a chair, plug in a lamp, put out the rug. And fill the shelf. Sit and admire the shelf for two hours from the sofa because you like it so much but also because you are too tired to move.

Step nine. The window-box-jigsaw-mid-century-brown-wooden-bookshelf is perfect. It stands out nicely against our periwinkle-blue study room walls. It’s a little eccentric, super stylish, quite a bit practical, and fits the things we need it to. If you want your own, look at the picture and take some inspiration from it. Or build an identical one. If you need a practical list of instructions though, take a picture of this one to someone who has actual know-how. And go from there. There’s definitely an easier way to make this shelf, and it doesn’t start with: Make twelve identical window boxes. (We only ended up using nine, anyway.)

Start off with really quirky or interesting pens. Buy pens based on how ink flows, how they look, how they make you feel, or how the ink coordinates with different styles of photographs or art. Liquid black ink for paper postcards coloured with watercolour art, coloured gel for writing on photographs. A green pen for a postcard whose writing template is printed in red ink.

My favourite pen is a purple metal one engraved with the name ‘Persnickety Jane’. It’s narrow and sleek with gold edges, and smaller and more delicate looking than a standard metal pen, and I just love the feel of it in my hands. The only way I would love it more is if the black ink in it was liquid.

Always buy two copies of favourite postcards. One always inevitably gets sent to someone else. Which is why I no longer have the illustrated map of wales postcard that I absolutely loved when I saw it. And when you travel, add stamps to the initial necessary purchases such as currency from the country you are visiting, you will always end up somewhere near a mailbox, and even more often near postcards, purchasing stamps needs to be a little more intentional.

Write on the front of your postcards. Write on the back. Write on both. There isn’t a rule. As long as you block off a tiny space to cram in the address on the back and leave room for a stamp, you are fine.

Get inspired by mistakes. Don’t worry about typos. Make a typo in ink? Color in, or bold that word and a bunch of others like it. Now it’s artsy and intentional. Cross out mistakes. Make a few more, and cross them out too.

Buy a postcard with a map of the area you are travelling around. Illustrated. Stylized. Topographical. Mark every location you visit with an a, b, c, d, e in the order you visited them and refer to this ‘legend’ when writing your letter on the back, or making notes for a travel journal later, to help you remember where you went, and where and when you saw what or who.

When you travel to a visually-inspiring place, don’t worry about not being a photographer. Somewhere out there, a photographer will have taken your perfect photo of it. Taking the time to search out a postcard of that location is worth it.

Cooks and gardeners: Keep a travel recipe box full of the local and traditional recipes that you can often find printed on postcards, and purchase postcards that identify garden, wildflower, and plant species, for inspiration at home.

Write a letter detailing your travels over five different postcards. Send them to a friend. Send them all from different mailboxes, or in the wrong order. Imagine receiving postcard four-of-five, and then receiving two-of five, a few days or a few weeks later. It’s giving someone the gift of anticipation.

What type of writing encompasses your latest travels? Is it a collection of moments that you can connect to various places on a map? Or is it one long adventure that needs to be detailed over the backs of three or four postcards that show the beautiful scenery that you are trying to describe in the letter?

Have you ever tried to describe a goanna when you’ve never seen one before or didn’t even know they existed? When one walked within a few feet of me in a mine mess in Australia, in all its eight-foot long glory, looking like a lizard with claws like a dog, I bought a postcard of the exact one I saw to show everyone back at home.

Postmarks are and can be part of making postcards artful, or special to someone. Give someone the gift of impossibility. Where else could they get a postcard outlining a map of Guernsey Island, and postmarked in France, for example, unless it’s from you, written and created during your travelling. How amazing, especially if you are travelling to someone’s hometown, or somewhere else that holds great sentiment for a friend.

What about playing tourist in a town or city you know well? Who says you have to send someone a postcard from somewhere overseas, not all of your friends have visited the city where you live, unless you live in Guernsey or Iceland, population sixty-thousand and three-hundred thousand, respectively. We all have reasons we love our tiny little hometowns or cities, they must be outlined in postcards somewhere.

I have this idea I’d like to do too. Have postcards printed of me mailing postcards into the most interesting mailboxes I’ve seen. Very meta.

Finally, have a special place set aside for postcards. All of them, ones you receive, keep, send, or will send.  Mine get stacked on a little corner of the bookshelf in my living room. Why send someone a card, when you could send them a postcard you’ve collected along the way, with a miniature letter written somewhere on it.

That reminds me. I have a postcard to write, for someone who lives a twenty-minute walk away.