The Lettermate

The Lettermate
Gifted by: The Lettermate
www.thelettermate.com
Reviewed by: Dana Byerwalter, Editor, AllFreeDIYWeddings.com


Meet The Lettermate, a handy little tool to help you address envelopes in style . . . and in straight lines! For those of us who have trouble keeping our text in place, the Lettermate will be your new best friend. In fact, even if you have flawless handwriting the Lettermate can help you think differently about the ways you can address those envelopes! Get excited to play with mixing fonts and adding happy doodles to an otherwise ordinary envelope.

My handwriting is pretty off the rails, so when I saw this awesome tool and all of the ideas that accompany it, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a review copy! The Lettermate is so much fun to play with.

Here's an example of what a normal address might look like sans Lettermate:

Like I said, off the rails. And then I started playing with The Lettermate. . . .

Much cleaner! Although I probably should have read the directions sooner, because as you can see, I didn't know what to do with my g's and y's! The packaging happily suggests writing in all caps as you adjust to using The Lettermate. All caps alleviates the problem of letters with descenders!

I also hit the borders of the stencil a few times as I wrote out the above address. You can see where the bottom of the 3 flatlined a little, and the U and S in United States have perhaps seen better days. Another tip from The Lettermate: try not to drag your pen against the die cut windows!

The Jane Eyre example was my first attempt at writing in all caps and avoiding hitting the stencil with my pen. The text size varied slightly as I experimented with how closely I could get my pen to the stencil, but otherwise I am pleased with the turnout! I also tried center-aligning the text. There are little dots near the grid lines at the top of The Lettermate to serve as a guide for center-aligning your text.

By the way, up to this point I'd been using a felt tip pen measuring .03mm, but The Lettermate actually recommends using .05mm or higher! I tried out a few other pens below too.

I tried adding in some images for the below example! The window is not my finest work, but otherwise it was very fun to add in some little accents in an otherwise plain address!

Next I had some fun with a pretend love letter. I also realized that my cursive is EXTREMELY rusty. Some of the cutest ideas for The Lettermate included some combination of print text and cursive. I need to up my cursive game and the quality of my addresses will be so much better!

This last example is probably my favorite, and it came about after looking through the gallery on The Lettermate website for some additional inspiration! One recommendation I read is that, if you want to add an accent word or doodle outside the lines of the stencil, outline the rectangle in pencil so you still have a guide to work with.

And here is the finished product without that pencil outline:

These are just a few of my own humble examples, so be sure to check out The Lettermate gallery for more ideas! Perfect for wedding invitations, thank you notes, just because letters, and more, The Lettermate is a darling little tool that all letter writers should have!