Our friend Pamela Hovland is an extraordinary designer who helped us create the original look for Improvised Life. Our first year in business, we wrote about her clever use of ripped-out pages from magazines as her envelopes. Recently she sent us this beauty with the message “this wrapper had your name all over it“. Indeed it did.

We held back from opening it until we could photograph it; it is an enduringly good and charming improvisation. 

Pamela tore this page out of a magazine and folded it into thirds to make an “envelope”. She stapled the ends and added self-stick address labels (we Photoshopped out our addresses). Even the back is beautiful:

Inside, she tucked a little note. But the bigger message was the whole presentation, like a little artwork via mail.

Pamela’s magazine snail mail also changes our view when we look through magazines. We begin to SEE pages that would make swell envelopes, to rip out and collect in a basket for future use, as Pamela taught us.