Star Wars Letterbox Trading Card Album Back Story

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...Blackvelvetrav (me) hosted her first Letterbox Trading Card (LTC) Exchange Tracker.  If you have never participated in an LTC tracker before a tracker is to help keep track of primarily Postal Letterboxes and LTC exchanges.  Atlas Quest created the tracker application which is great because it shows a list of who has signed up to receive the object or objects in question (in this case LTC's), and the current status of everyone involved with the tracker. The owner of the tracker (in this case me) can specify the rules that are associated with them such as which type of objects are supported, the maximum number of participants, etc.

I thought it would be fun to include an LTC exchange in conjunction with our Star Wars the Letterbox Force Awakens Event on December 18th & 19th.  The extra LTC's could be placed in with the raffle prizes and if the Letterboxer was willing they could loan us their stamp for the event.

I need to roll the clock back a bit here in my saga.  You see I had intergalactic plans much bigger than just sending Letterboxers back their used envelopes with a Ziploc baggie of LTC's.  I had asked Kendall (Little Miss Kitty) to create an accordion album of sorts (maybe using Star Wars themed paper) on the pages to keep in line with the theme.  In 2012 Kendall created adorable mini albums for our Down the Rabbit Hole (Alice in Wonderland) Letterboxing Event.  They were not LTC albums but were thank you albums with large tags inside that were used to send back stamped images of all the stamps at the event as memento's to those that loaned us their stamps for the event.  You can see how cute they are here:
 

Thank You Wonderland Booklets
http://lbwithblackvelvetrav.blogspot.com/2012/11/thank-you-wonderland-booklets.html

I will admit that Kendall, Kelly and I spent untold hours creating, assembling, stamping and mailing back the extremely labor intensive Alice in Wonderland albums.  In total 20 were created and returned to local and out of state Letterboxers.  I swore we would never do that again based on the time involved. 

Fast forward to our Star Wars LTC Tracker and as always Kendall was so gracious in accepting my new mission (even after all the hours she spent in 2012 on the thank you keepsakes).  However, this time Kendall had a vision light years beyond my simple thoughts.  As I explained what I wanted to use the albums for Kendall's highly imaginative mind creativity kicked into light speed and she went to work on 18 custom handmade mini albums to hold the LTC's that we would be returning to the LTC Trackers contributors/participants.

This time around Kendall took the total burden of concept, design, creation, filling and mailing of the albums.  She spent an absolutely enormous amount of time and resources creating each individual page, cloth covers, binding and at times hand gluing individual pieces to each and every page.  All I did was coordinate the exchange tracker, create my own LTC's and then I handed them all over to Kendall.

Above is a sneak peak of the outside of the albums.  Kendall found several patterns of Star Wars Themed material and covered the albums in a variety of fun prints.  Then topped each off with a graphic of Admiral Gial Ackbar.  In case you are not familiar with Admiral Ackbar he was the foremost military commander of the Rebel Alliance who led major combat operations against the Galactic Empire.

At this point if you did not sign up for my Star Wars LTC tracker last year you may just be having serious regrets over that decision as the Dark Force definitely led you down the wrong path.  As Yoda would say "When you look at the dark side, careful you must be.  For the dark side looks back."  Are you wondering what is inside these completely unique handmade Star Wars LTC albums?  Stay tuned for my next transmission and all shall be revealed.