Cute Snail Mail With Letter Sets From Dreaming of Tokyo

I love to send surprise post to my friends and family and using cute stationery makes it even more fun. Dreaming of Tokyo gifted me some of their super cute Japanese letter sets to try so read on for a review and some ideas for your own cute snail mail.

Both letter sets are from Furukawa Paper Works, a Japanese company that’s been around for nearly 200 years! Their designs have a traditional and nostalgic feel, while still keeping up with current stationery trends. Dreaming of Tokyo sent me 2 letter sets, which arrived very quickly and well-packaged with a little hand-written note. The letter sets themselves were packaged really nicely too with paper bands to hold everything together. An especially nice touch is the forest set being arranged in a way to let you see a bit of all the designs. Both sets are priced at a very reasonable £5.25.

The forest letter set is perfect for nature lovers with all kinds of trees in a watercolour style – and even a little bear! You get 2 writing paper sheets and 1 envelope for each of the 3 designs so you can write a longer letter all in one design or mix and match them. They’re made with premium quality Mino-washi paper and you can see that it’s slightly translucent. This also means you can lay it over some lined paper if you need help keeping your writing straight or trace over a printed lettering sheet for fancy titles.

The other set features one of the most popular themes for stationery – cats! This has a rubber stamp-style design with lots of cute cats in various poses, along with some colourful toys. This set has 10 writing paper sheets and 5 envelopes, all with the same design, so is ideal for longer letters or for sending a single sheet to lots of friends. It’s made with the same Mino-washi paper and already comes with printed lines.

Both sets are high quality and the paper has a lovely textured feel that is beautiful to write on. Even the lined sheets give you plenty of space so you can fill in all your news without using up too many sheets. The paper is thicker than it looks but the handmade texture means some marker pens may bleed so test your pen first with a little doodle if you want to write on both sides.

Making snail mail even more fun

Anyone would be delighted to receive a simple letter or note on these papers but here’s some of my favourite tips to make your mail extra cute and special:

• Use lettering & doodles – even though these papers are already cute it’s still nice to add some extra touches. I like to include a kawaii doodle of the current weather (well, I am British!) and maybe write their name or hello in a more fancy lettering style. We have lots of art & drawing and journaling posts for inspiration, or you can use stencils, stamps or stickers.
• Decorate the envelope – these envelopes are far too nice to cover up with postage stamps and customs forms that keep getting bigger and bigger so I prefer to only add their name and send it inside a larger envelope. Use some matching stickers, rubber stamps, washi tape and markers to make it feel even more exciting to open.
• Add some stationery gifts – sticker flakes are ideal, as you usually get multiples of each design, or share a few sheets from your favourite memo pads and sticky notes. You can also make washi tape sample cards by winding some tape around things like playing cards or leftover plastic packaging.
• Make it a gift package – many countries restrict the size and contents of a letter and if you have to pay for it to be a package, why not put it in a mailing box and add some bigger gifts? Little snacks like KitKats are always fun to receive and I often include things like button badges, mini erasers and even make something in origami.

I hope you’re inspired to send more snail mail! I’m looking forward to writing to my friends soon and sharing these lovely designs.

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Dreaming of Tokyo ships worldwide from the UK and have a lovely range of letter sets, stickers, washi tape, memo pads, sticky notes, pens and much more from popular Japanese brands. SCK readers get an exclusive 10% off all orders OVER £35 with code SCK10 + free UK shipping.

(Products were provided by Dreaming of Tokyo for review but all words, photographs and opinions are my own.)