Made It - Welcome Spring With A Weathergram

Hello! According to the calendar, spring arrives tomorrow. Alas, the weather we had today felt more like winter - highs in the 20's, a brisk wind and some lake effect snow. So, I thought, why not encourage spring to come ASAP by hanging up a weathergram tomorrow? 

I'd first learned of weathergrams in Maureen Crawford's Handmade Greeting Cards, the book that got me started on what's become an enjoyable hobby. Crawford explains: "Japanese in origin, weathergrams are short poems written on biodegradable paper and hung outdoors to be mellowed by nature...They are replaced at the equinox and solstice and become a unique way of celebrating the seasons". 

Crawford's instructions for making a weathergram call for cutting a piece of brown paper 3"x11", folding down a flap measuring 2 1/2" along one end, punching a hole in the middle of the upper edge of the flap, and threading a piece of twine (she suggests 15" length) through the hole so that the weathergram can be hung outside. A seasonal poem is then written on the long section below the flap. 

Just out of curiousity, I googled "weathergram" and came up with similar directions as well as images of various weathergrams. These Internet directions generally called for using brown kraft paper (paper grocery bags are a good source, of course). A poem consisting of no more than ten words in length was suggested. 

The Internet weathergram poems seemed to have been moslty written in lovely calligraphy. I'm not a calligraphist, so I made do with a Sharpie Ultra Fine marker.

Some of the weathergrams I saw online had been stamped with an image; the ones I saw had Asian writing on them. I used a rubber stamp from the Sun, Moon, and Stars stamp set produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (a garage sale find). The stamp I chose is based on a 16th C. woodblock print. 

So here's what I'll be hanging up tomorrow:

Close-up of the stamped image:

(The stamps in the set came mounted on soft backings, which makes it hard to get clear stampings from the detailed images these stamps have. Perhaps this is why the set showed up at a garage sale!)

I'm not crazy about my printing compared to the calligraphy I saw online, but it'll do. I wanted to post this tonight so that if anyone reads it soon, they'll be able to make their own weathergrams in time to welcome spring!