Deco Days

This morning I was looking for an unfinished project that I wanted to make some progress on. I turned to the closet in my son's room which is where most of my unfinished projects go to die and I uncovered this little suitcase shoved in the back while moving stuff around. I had no idea what I could have possibly stored in it. I opened it up and revealed a long lost look into my crafting history. A part I had completely forgotten about. Sandwiched between my Scrapbooking years and my ATC phase. At least fifteen years ago, maybe longer I had discovered the world of decos. Something akin to a Friendship Book which are small little handmade booklets that are passed along a chain of people through the mail. With a "deco" these little booklets are decorated with collage materials, magazine images, rubber stamps, patterned papers and other little embellishments. Oftentimes, the deco will have a theme. You mail your blank little themed booklet out and each person who receives it decorates and signs a full page in the book. They send it on to another person and when the booklet is fully decorated, they are sent home to the person who originally created it. Oh, how I loved these little books and mail swaps. I created so many of them. It was always a treat to receive a finished deco. But it didn't happen often. For every ten decos I released into the world only one, maybe two would return. In the deco mail art world there were always those who flaked, never passed them along, lost them, dropped out and off the face of the earth and you would never see your little booklet again. I sometimes imagined an evil deco queen sitting on a throne of unmailed decos laughing maniacally.

This little suitcase was filled with decos that did make it home all decorated and filled with little pieces of other people's imaginations and ideas. Themes like Pharoahs, Time, Men of Mystery, Spring, Travel, Time - so fun. I had a blast looking through them. It makes me want to do this again! I wonder if there are still deco groups out there. I will have to find out. Meanwhile, my unfinished project remains unfinished.