Taking Dave to the National Postal Museum

I'm not exaggerating when I say that Dave has heard me hype this museum for years... It must have been about 6 or 7 years ago when I first told Dave about the National Postal Museum in DC. I had never known about this museum until I had stumbled across it while looking for new places to visit in DC. And because it's not on the Mall with the other Smithsonians it appears most other people have never heard of it either. But if you ever get the chance to go, it really is a find!


Well needless to say, Dave made my weekend (even before it started) when he finally agreed to go to the museum with me. I was SO excited! Although we went on Sunday to "avoid the crowds" I assured him that there wouldn't be any crowds no matter when we went. Sure enough, when we got there it felt like we practically had the museum to ourselves.

Although it's nowhere near as big as most of the other Smithsonians, this museum is jam-packed full of information and interactive exhibits about how the postal system evolved into what we know today. Dave and I first started our postal journey through the treacherous terrains travelled by the Pony Express riders.


Then we made our to way to "ride" in a stagecoach that used to carry passengers and mail to the towns. We both sat in the stagecoach facing these three folks (and the little baby!) as we listened to how they used to deliver mail. You would not believe how many people they would squeeze in a stagecoach. I think they said their record was 23 people, inside and out!

Here's Dave in the stagecoach!

I think my favorite section of the museum was around the beginning of the 20th century when the postal system started making some great advancements. Would you believe that in some metro areas they used to have pneumatic tubes that ran under the streets to deliver mail? They would travel at 35mph under the streets! And if a tube got jammed they'd have to dig up the street. I also liked seeing the evolution of public mailbox designs too. It was interesting to see the numerous designs they tried (one was even red!) before they finally evolved to the blue mailboxes we use today.

After all of that Dave and I played in another interactive section of the museum where we each created an "identity" (with a photograph!) so that the exhibit could illustrate how mail order companies use these profiles to target their intended audience. When we finished going through that exhibit we turned in our "identity cards" so that a multipurpose printer type machine could deliver us a personalized letter stuffed into an envelope addressed to us! Sounds simple, but it was really cool.

Of course we also saw Owney the post office mascot who used to travel all over the place with the mail. He wore a jacket with all the souvenir post office tags he collected. It was cute to see the little dog in his jacket and everything until we realized that it might actually be Owney! (I found out later that it actually was him...)

Although there was a whole other section of the museum devoted to stamps, we weren't that interested in that part (and we were also getting pretty museum'd out). But before we left we made sure to create some free souvenir postcards. Here's what one of my postcards looked like.

As you can probably tell. we had a fun time at the museum. And the best part of all was that it lived up to my hype - Dave liked it too!

Even if you can't get the chance to visit the museum in person you can check out their website at http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/index.html.

From this site you can take a virtual museum tour and see additional online exhibits as well. As Dave said after our visit, delivering mail wasn't just about getting packages and parcels from point A to point B - it's a very significant piece of our growth as a nation. I hope you like your visit as much as we did!

My new coaster!

Dave originally asked me if I could sew him some coasters because he didn't like how his current cork coasters kept sticking to his drinking glasses. Somehow this project didn't inspire me very much. But recently Dave bought a fancy new Adobe Illustrator software program and has been raving on and on to me about how powerful this program is and how many fancy things it can do. So that inspired me to try drawing a simple little (coaster-size) sewing project in the computer.

I thought I would need to borrow his fancy software but he told me I should be able to do the same thing in Corel Draw. (Don't worry, he wasn't being stingy. It would just save me from having to use the software at his house.) Although I didn't have any luck the previous time I tried to draw something on the computer, I figured I'd give it another go....

And I'm so glad I did because I was able to create this little owl in less than a half hour! I was so excited and couldn't wait to bring him to life in wool! Once I got the hang of using the drawing program, it was so much easier for me to draw the pattern shapes by computer instead of trying to do them by hand.

You can see that he's mostly made up of a bunch of triangles and oval/circle shapes. Using these basic shapes, I made a few tiny tweaks to try and give him a little more character and voila! I think he's really cute and I may whip up some others to complete a set.

It was fun to draw this way because it was so much easier to adjust shapes and keep things symmetrical. And it was also much easier to size the scale of the finished drawing once I was happy with the design.

As for Dave, although he admired my handiwork he said that he "wasn't into fabric coasters". Go figure!