Five Cent Stamps, ATCs and Handmade Envelopes

I just finished two separate ATC trades with the theme of postage stamps. The challenge for both trades was to make a collage of stamps for the background of the ATCs. That was not too difficult a task, but trying to decide what to do as an embellishment or for something in the foreground had me stumped for a few days. The stamps came from a box of stamps my grandmother sent me in the 1960s when I was an avid stamp collector. She had a friend who worked for a publisher, and the friend gave the stamps from the manuscript packages to my grandmother to send to me. I have dozens of the same stamps, mostly five  to eight cent commemoratives. I made both collages the same, but the second one has two different stamps. I could do a comparison puzzle with the two; "How many differences can you spot between these two cards?"
For the finish on both cards, I cut out the "golden five" from two little copies of Charles Demuth's painting, The Figure 5 in Gold, and glued them down over the stamps. I thought that tied the card together: five cent stamps and the number "5." I outlined the stamps and the fives with black gel-pen. My hand is not very steady any more, so there is a wobble on the outline of the fives of each card. That just proves it was handmade, right?

I also sent off a card in a "Heart" ATC trade. That one started as a copy of a scherenschnitte Valentine that I made a few years ago. I scanned it and reduced the size to the dimensions of an Artist Trading Card, 2 1/2 in.  x 3 1/2 in. Using pen and ink, I added dots and some squiggles to change it a bit. I have used copies of this paper cutting for ATCs in the past.

Using the envelope maker that my daughter gave me for Christmas, I made the envelopes to send off the cards. The papers I used were wallpaper, and pages from magazines. I worry about the magazine pages going through the postal sorting machines because it is thinner than envelope paper, but I have sent some magazine-page envelopes through the mail successfully in the past. Here are some before and after shots of two of the envelopes, front and back: