Pushing the envelope - Patchwork quilt collage with envelopes and stamps

Messing around with the design for another stamp collage based on a patchwork quilt theme , I found myself cutting up some old air mail envelopes I'd recently picked up in a local charity shop to use as background for the flower basket motif which would appear in each square of the new piece. I had initially been  attracted by the postmarks from far away places with romantic sounding names such as Sacramento, Boulder City, Buffalo and Albuquerque, not really knowing what I was going to do with these old and somewhat tatty pieces of postal history, other than store them away to look at until inspiration should strike!  The stamps on the envelopes were mostly "nothing to write home about" - excuse the pun - but some were a bit more intriguing, such as the air mail envelope sent from California in 1938 which has the 6c American eagle Air mail stamp designed by President Franklin D Roosevelt himself, and which also has an interesting logo in red, showing  Placerville Calif. Pony Express Station and another logo slightly hidden by two green George Washington 1 cent stamps. It appears to be commemmorating National Air Mail week 1918-1938.
I never cut up anything I'm even slightly concerned might be "collectable" so this will end up in my own album!  However, some of the others have now been cut into squares and are being laid out for the background to the main design, complete with their red, white and blue air mail striped borders.

Rather liked this envelope so it's one to be kept!

Pushing the envelope is a phrase we often hear and I  wondered where it originated. In fact, it was first used in the 1950s when the space race began and the term, "pushing the edge of the envelope" came into being. The "envelope" referred to the atmosphere surrounding the Earth and to reach its edge was to reach space. Pushing the envelope is really about pushing boundaries or going beyond what you have been safely used to doing. In a small way, I'm pushing my own personal envelope, incorporating new, or in this case rather old or vintage,  materials into my  work, which just happen to be envelopes! Artists do this all the time really and often change their style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but it's good to push those boundaries and experiment!

Still experimenting with a flower basket motif to add to my background of envelopes

Fronts and insides of envelopes form the basis of my latest "postal" patchwork quilt