What is The Sunday Letter Project?
When we opened our bricks-and-mortar stationery shop in 2023, we found that a theme began to emerge: there is a general, human longing for a simpler time. For a time when people wrote letters, lived more slowly, and had more time and space for consideration. So many people who walk through our doors express a quiet sadness about the fact that ‘no one writes letters anymore’.
With so much talk in recent years of how dependent we have all become on technology, it occurred to us that letters may well pose the perfect antidote. In a busy, tiring world full of screens, writing a letter can take you right back to basics and remind you of what is really important.
We know how hard it can be to find time for things like this, so we thought that a collective, weekly movement would be a powerful way to create a letter-writing ritual. The concept is simple: you sign a free pledge on our website and commit to writing one letter a week, on a Sunday.
The Sunday Letter Project is a weekly invitation to balance. To recalibrate, reconnect, and return home. We believe that letter-writing is the perfect antidote to this generation’s dependence on technology – it allows you to slip back into a time where the world felt less frantic and more spacious.
By signing up for the project, you will be invited to take a pledge: a pledge to take a pocket of time each Sunday and dedicate it to yourself and your loved ones. To write, to ponder, to savour. To regenerate a practice that has connected humans for generations and is starting to be lost. We believe letter writing is a unique way that we can find our way home as humans, and we invite you to join us.
We hope that you will be able to keep your promise to yourself, and fall in love with the ritual of letter writing. Choosing an ink, adding in stickers or photographs, picking out an envelope. The way that handwriting holds emotion and feeling within its distinctive lines. The way it freezes time and provides a portal into a moment that can never otherwise be revisited. The enormous, unique feeling of delight when you spot an envelope on your doormat with scrawled ink and know that someone has set aside that time, thought, and energy just for you.
A letter is the exact opposite of how we usually communicate now. In a world of text and email, people expect communication to be instant, casual, and constant. I think so many of us are tired of this way of being and are ready to step back into a gentle rhythm of meaningful, thoughtful correspondence. If that is you, please accept our invitation, and begin to write your way home.
As of 26th October 2025, we have 803 people signed up to the project. One small promise multiplies quickly. A single Sunday letter becomes 52 in a year. A hundred of us make 5,200. A thousand of us could create half a million handwritten letters within a decade. Together, these small acts of connection can add up to something much bigger – a library of real human voices and emotion, preserved in handwriting for years to come.
Who is behind the project?
We are Rebecca and Karl, a husband and wife team based in Cheltenham. We started Wildflower Illustration Co. in 2015 because we believe in the power of a handwritten note to brighten someone’s day or capture a shared memory.
Starting out at the kitchen table of our flat, we moved to a barn studio in 2018. However, in September 2023 we finally achieved our dream of opening a bricks and mortar stationery shop in The Suffolks, Cheltenham. This now houses our studio, shop as well as an event space, where we host creative workshops and events.
We started The Sunday Letter Project as a response to the number of people who come into the shop and say what a shame it is that no one writes letters anymore. We thought, well, maybe we could do something about that. A letter is so much more than just the paper and ink - the handwriting preserves an essence of our loved ones. Memories written down are protected from ever fading. The act of writing itself gives us a much needed pause - it’s the gift of time to the recipient but it’s a gift to yourself, too.
WHO CAN I WRITE TO?
We have also been working on a few ideas of people you could write to, if you would like to actually send your letter in the post, and you’ve written to most of your friends and family already!
Here is a short, non-exhaustive list of ideas:
From Me to You Letters, a charity that facilitates the sending of letters to those going through cancer treatment
A local care home (please just contact them first to check that they would accept a letter, but most do)
A stranger – if you wish to write to a perfect stranger, you can send them to our shop where we will create a basket of letters free to collect by our shop customers. Feel free to narrow this down if relevant, e.g. ‘a letter to a new mother’
Answer a question asked by our audience, to build a ‘Library of Letters.’ Please see questions below. If you send these to the shop, we will scan, transcribe and share these on our blog.
The address for the shop is:
Wildflower Illustration Co.
26 Suffolk Parade
Cheltenham
GL50 2AE
Here are some of the questions (asked by real people on TikTok) that you may or may not feel qualified to answer:
How do you allow yourself to settle into your current chapter in life while still being open to growth and change?
How do you tap into your emotions when you have felt numb for so many years?
What does the voice inside your head sound like?
How do I stop defining myself by my titles of mom, teacher, and sister?
For older adults in queer relationships: tell me about your love story. How did you find your person?
What inspires you to keep trying every day, even when there is so much bitterness and anger in the world?
What do you miss from days gone by? What do you fear we as a society will forget? If you could teach me one thing, what would it be?
What story do you wish you could tell the whole world?
Exactly how do you give yourself grace? What does it look like in real time?
How do you find quiet and calm when your world feels chaotic and overwhelming?
How do you decide when a chapter of your life isn’t finished, and when it is?
If you could do one moment in your life over, what would it be and would you live it the same way or differently?
As an empty nester with married children and grandchildren, what was your most difficult phase of parenting, and why?
What makes life worth living?
What healed your heart?
How do you learn who you are when you’ve been lost for so long? How do you find an identity that isn’t what your parents wanted, or what you had to be for your kids? How do you find and learn to love yourself?
How do you know if you are doing a good job of raising your children?
How do you cope when your grown children have valid criticisms of the way you raised them? How do you survive that guilt?
How do you balance unexpectedly caretaking an aging parent and deferring (again) the dreams you had for your soon-to-arrive retirement years?
Do you believe love and kindness will lead us back to a vibrant society?
How have you made peace with one of your past mistakes?
How does nature heal you?