About two years ago (give or take) I met someone on a discord server that, a year later, would end up becoming one of the most important people in my life. Her name is Nat, and as of writing this, our first anniversary is coming close. I plan to make him a custom cd and mail it to her as a gift.
I first got this idea off of pinterest by seeing people burning CDs for their partners and making custom covers and booklets, but the idea was really sold to me by a video of a someone who made an entire booklet with words on each song asking someone to be their girlfriend. I love the idea! I've bought things for my girlfriend via etsy before, which was a lot easier than making something myself to mail since it was more ensured it would get to him. Plus, it was considerably cheaper.
However, by the time I'm writing this, our anniversary is coming close, and this time I want to make something more special.
It's the dream of every long distance couple to have something tangible and physical that was once in their partner's hands, I think. It's a really nice idea to have something handmade by your partner who lives so far away. With me being in Argentina, and her being in Canada, I figured our anniversary is the perfect excuse to go through the trouble to do this!
because... yeah, mailing something from Argentina might be a bit of trouble, I don't know yet, I haven't finished the gift...
The first thing I did was decide how I'd put together the tracklist. Something that I thought would be a nice detail was that I used CDs in my house to get songs for the list.
I ripped songs off of CDs I found around my house to put in this one, mostly because I thought the idea of it being mostly made out of songs I physically own would be a nice touch.
At the end, I ended up adding songs downloaded off of youtube, but the main idea is still there. Among the songs I got from CDs in my house I included some Louis Armstrong, Carpenters, and Jack Johnson.
For the sake of simplicity I decided to use Windows Media Player as well, even though I have a CD burner software I found off of reddit... ehh, I thought the most simple option would be the easiest.
In the end, the tracklist ended up being a mix of youtube to mp3 songs from our shared playlist, songs from CDs in my house, and like two songs that a friend of a friend made on bandcamp. Oh, and one track that I made for him for our six months. I thought that'd be a nice touch.
A lot of these songs have really specific meanings for us... mostly Jack Johnson, it was hard not to include them.
After overthinking it a lot, I decided to finish working on the tracklist and just burn the CD. I opted to go buy a bunch of CDs at a stationery store around the neighbourhood rather than buy them online, and I bought a bunch because I figured I might want to make more CDs overtime. Thankfully I got a DVD/CD player for my birthday a few years ago, since I'm a nerd who likes to collect physical media. This player is neat because it can also burn DVDs and CDs! Isn't technology so cool.
The trickiest part was making the case.
I couldn't find a new one to purchase, so I decided to grab one of my old CD's and just use that case. I think I spent like half an hour trying to figure out how to open the back of the CD case to get the art from that off, I found this video from a really nice lady from... fourteen years ago on youtube. It dawned on me how what I was doing is completley obsolete. Oops.
by this point, I also started wondering if my girlfriend even has a CD player at home she could reasonably use to listen to this in private... I asked him as casually as I could, and hopefully she didn't guess that this is what I'm planning. I'm pretty sure she has one, if only I was able to ask things without making it obvious that I'm making him a gift.
But my favorite part of this entire project so far has been making the case art and booklet.
I decided to copy the idea of the video I saw on pinterest and make a booklet with thoughts on why I chose each song, plus really nice box art with stickers and doodles. I added stickers of Sonic and Shadow because... well it's hard to explain, but we've always liked to relate to Sonic ships, and I had stickers on hand that felt like they'd be a nice touch :) I also wrote a tracklist on the back.
Here's how the box turned out!
The next thing I did was write a few words on each song inside the booklet, it got difficult not repeating the same thing, since a lot of the songs are about the same topics. I think it turned out nice though :) the only thing left now is packaging it and mailing it out! I'm not fully sure how to do that, but I'll update this blog entry once it's mailed out.
Update! I went to the post office today (march 20th) to ask a few questions as to how to go about mailing it out properly, since I haven't really mailed out anything like this before ever. They were really nice to me and gave me a specific envelope for it and everything. I added a couple of extra details to the gift, like a sonic bracelet to match with my shadow one and a portrait of him :) I'm mailing it out either tomorrow or on monday, but I'm getting closer! I even took a picture with it to send to him after she gets it to show him it HAS in fact been in my hands.
I hope she likes it!!