Behind the Scenes for "(Anti) Love Letter to your Senator" - 2/7/2026

Welcome to our first Behind the Scenes! These will probably end up being mostly about the invite-printing process, since that's most of the setup for most SLURMs.

This was an extremely last-minute SLURM. We'd just put on SLURMAGER HUNT, which was a fair bit of (armchair) work to devise all the challenges for. (I'd gotten loads of suggestions especially from Troy at Sweet Streets & his other half after we'd played the Jet Lag home game in preparation for Jet Lag Hide & Seek, but those left us far short of a complete list -- not to mention formatting everything up all nice and going to the city library to print challenge packets.) After the hunt, and after judging the hunt in the cold, Kyle pitched an indoor option for February: hole up in a coffee shop and write our reps.

Since the Utah legislative session is already underway and some of the bills of interest are starting to make it out of rules, we pulled a super quick turnaround and Kyle wrote up some copy for the invite, sent it to Sofia (the founder of SLURM, and the primary host of this event!) to rewrite, and got everything typeset. Here's the "forme" (yes, that's with an e). I had a little bit of fun using the ornaments from Skyline's Collection No. 16. Typesetting and lockup took about 2.5~3 hours and printing incl. setup/cleanup for the run of 25 invites took about the same -- I've started printing more copies now that the mailing list has grown. Becca (the other SLURM organizer) hopes to do some additional in-person distribution so I'll certainly keep it up.

We're very glad we could get Sofia for this one since she interned at the legislature last session (2025) and, as the first line of defense for her legislator's inbox, can provide a lot of valuable guidance on how to effectively reach the state senators and representatives. She also has a typewriter. Did I mention that yet? It's so much fun.

Some participants volunteered to bring stamps and envelopes, so I'll see if I can get some stationary a bit cuter than copy paper to work with and we'll be off to the races. Of course we expect and hope some folks will bring computers -- it'll make research easier and of course there's email.

Anyways, here's how the final invite came out:
(I wanted to do this one in a single pass and single brayer for time, so I printed with three colors on the ink plate: Napthol Red, Process Magenta, and magenta with a tad of blue to make the dull purple. Usually, the invites are done with one pass under the rolling pin but inked with two brayers (black and lime green) then hand-stamped for the magenta. I think it ended up looking great!)

~ Written by Kyle on 2026-02-03