Wild & Gilded - correspondence, enchanted
Imagine this. Once a month a letter arrives from Tuscany and for a few moments, everything else can wait. Paper and ink. Gold leaf. The theme changes - a season, a creature, sometimes something older than either, but always a handwritten letter and small treasures made by hand. Old stories and everyday enchantment from a stone farmhouse beside an ancient village. The letters are scented, so you can smell it too.I'm inviting you to join me in spirit while I gild actual lilies, paint the walls damson plum, and try to card alpaca fleece with a porcupine quill.
August's flower-themed letter
I'm Fiona Cameron Tankard. I write, paint, and live in a farmhouse beside an ancient village, with a husband, a Maine Coon, a collie, four alpacas, some bees, and a life-size metal stag called Rudolph who has refused, on principle, to play football with the dog. I want to share it all with you in a monthly Wild and Gilded letter.We spend our lives staring at screens. Wild and Gilded is a small rebellion against that. A real letter. Beautiful paper. A moment of wonder you can actually hold.Twenty years here have taught me that magic doesn't arrive on its own. You have to go and find it — in bees, old books, gold thread, and the unreasonable amount of joy to be had from a tube of gilding wax. Mostly I find it in small, slightly ridiculous places. I'd like to send you what I find.
The Wild and Gilded Letter Club
Once a month, an envelope turns up — handwritten on whatever beautiful paper I've hoarded lately (Florentine, handmade in Rome, occasionally gilded), faintly scented, and brimming with small treasures themed around whatever's happening here: sometimes a season, sometimes a creature, sometimes a story I can't stop thinking about.For five minutes, wherever you actually are, you're also with me here, maybe watching a swarm of bees settle on a branch, maybe looking at an Etruscan altar or the Fibonacci sequence in a sunflower. Then the letter ends, you go back to whatever you were doing, and something about the rest of the day feels rather magical.
What Arrives Every Month in Each Letter
The letters are sent out in the middle of each month. The subscription price includes postage. You can cancel anytime.Every letter includes:
* A handwritten letter
* Italian paper
* Original artwork for this month's theme
* A fragment of found marginalia - a name, a date, a scribbled note or a line of verse
* A recipe or lexicon
* Small seasonal discoveries
*Additional treasures and curiosities
About Fiona and Why I'm Doing This
I've lived here long enough that the Etruscans down the road no longer feel like neighbours as much as very quiet, very old colleagues. William, my husband, is a priest, which comes in handy more often than you'd think, mostly for blessing things that don't strictly need blessing.I started Wild and Gilded because I think letters matter and we’ve simply stopped writing them. It’s so lovely to get a letter, to actually hold beautiful paper that someone touched, to read words written with a fountain pen and ink that is not quite perfect and is maybe slightly smudged because a real hand wrote it. To pick up the energy and the magic of connection, even for five minutes. And to have something tangible to keep and to re-read.So that's the invitation. Letters from Tuscany with magical things inside.If you suspect the world contains more wonder than you're currently being offered, you're in the right place.
Receive your monthly measure of magic - a handwritten letter, premium paper and one-off treasures.
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Includes the next monthly letter
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