Swap-bot Time: March 28, 2024 5:47 am
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Crossed Letter #7 (Bridgerton-inspired!)

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Crossed Letter #7 (Bridgerton-inspired!)
Swap Coordinator:quillandparchment (contact)
Swap categories: Letters & Writing  Mail Art  Television 
Number of people in swap:4
Location:International
Type:Type 2: Flat mail
Last day to signup/drop:January 7, 2021
Date items must be sent by:January 12, 2021
Number of swap partners:1
Description:

You've seen the Netflix series. You might have read the books.

Let's chat about our love of Bridgerton and Julia Quinn's historical romances in historically-inspired crossed letters!

This is for those of us who have longed to receive and write a crossed letter, also called cross-hatching, like they did in Regency and Victorian England. Now we can all have a tiny piece of Austenland and gossip like Lady Whistledown's most eager confidant.

What, pray tell, is a crossed letter? Paper and postage used to be really expensive (nice paper still is, actually, and postage is always increasing). To save money, letter writers would write on a page using all available space, then turn it 90 degrees and continue writing on top of what they just wrote. If they were really pinching pennies, they would write their third page on the same page by turning it 45 degrees instead of 90 degrees to write diagonally. But that might be too much for our modern sensibilities. Just think- it's environmentally-friendly!

So! For this swap, please write a crossed letter to your swap partner of at least 2 pages (that is, 1 page, crossed at least once).

Write about:

  • Introducing yourself

  • What inspired you to write a crossed letter

  • What other guilty period-inspired wishes or habits you may have

  • Chat about Bridgerton or Julia Quinn's books!

    PLEASE write legibly. Some people find it helps to use different colours when they change directions (if you do this, I'd recommend using the lighter colour first and crossing with the darker colour), or to double-space their lines, but this isn't a requirement and I tend to use only one colour myself.

-Sealing wax is not a requirement, but just keep in mind if you do decide to use it that sealing wax often falls off modern paper in the modern postal system, so just prepare your letter accordingly so it will arrive to your partner safely. One idea is to seal the letter and then put that into another envelop, rather than sealing the envelop.

A crossed letter, sent on time, deserves a 5.

A flake deserves a 1. (Please. No one likes 1s. Don't flake! Send on time!)

I'm not requiring a rating minimum, but I reserve the right to weed out those with suspicious 1s.

Discussion

kizzlets 12/29/2020 #

This is so cool! Unfortunately, I don’t know much about Bridgerton or Julia Quinn's books.

quillandparchment 12/29/2020 #

That's ok! Watch a little bit of the show, or read a little bit of the books. Chat about Regency stuff. Let's not be elitist - it's just all in good fun.

kizzlets 12/31/2020 #

Ok, I'll do some research on it :)

caf1988 01/ 4/2021 #

They also wrote crossed letters during the American Civil War. When I did my history thesis in college I came across a bunch from one of my sources.

I highly recommend writing in print using two colors that play nicely with each other. Brown on brown on brown paper with 19th c script is mostly illegible 150 years later and was probably mostly illegible back then :-). I also recommend writing larger for the base layer and smaller for the top just to give it even more contrast.

If you're looking for other ideas of historically accurate letter writing, one of the letters in the collection I used for my thesis was written on (I guess) thin white butcher paper that was the size of a small table (2ft by 2ft minimum).

Interestingly enough, most of the letters in the collection (especially those written before the war was in full swing) were written on paper that looked incredibly similar to the 8x5 colored lined paper pads you can find at Dollar Tree! He seemed to like green and yellow the best. I was honestly shocked by how modern his paper looked.

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