Mural made of stamps at NMA

Hey internet! I accidentally didn't manage to do an Australia Day post over the weekend... was distracted by other things. But as I was surfing the net a little while ago I came across these awesome murals made out of stamps! Yep, wicked!

These Flag murals made of stamps are held at the National Museum of Australia and are pretty fun. They are Aussie in theme, so they kind of tie in with the Australia Day long weekend we just enjoyed.

Through the NMA website you can zoom in and get a good look at the individual stamps that make up the collages. They are pretty ace! I have so many spare stamps, but I don't think I have the time or the patience to put something like this together.

Celebrating Australia Day is somewhat fraught, which is part of the reason why I didn't do a themed post at the time. I don't myself refer to it as Invasion Day, but I certainly respect that some people do. But anyhow, it seemed like the right time to share these little pieces of Australiana with you. The murals were made by Alban Watkins to mark the Australian Bicentenary in 1988.

Also, I have a hot date at the museum tonight (not bragging or anything... ok I am totally bragging), so it made sense to post something museum related. I am off to the Melbourne museum, not the National Museum, so I probably won't see stamps. But it should be fun.

Anyhow, check out the Flag murals made of stamps, they form part of an online exhibition which you can access here.  Enjoy!

Thankyou João: Sunday Stamps

Last week I received this amazing letter from João in Brazil, which was a great delight. João contacted me after I put up a post about Australia's Christmas stamps and asked whether I would like to do a stamp swap, as he collects Christmas themed stamps.

The 2012 Christmas stamps are pretty cool, as you can see - they are round (interesting) and presented with a very nice cancellation. The Christmas stamps are great, but it was the other stamp on the envelope that totally caught my attention:

How wonderful! A stamp featuring a palaeontologist. João totally has me pegged. I really love the stamp design as well - the black and white portrait sketch against the intriguing background of a cave full of fossils. Awesome. Great stamp.

Inside the envelope João also sent me a couple of extra treats as well as mint copies of the two round Christmas stamps. My favourite was this clever stamp paying homage to libraries. I love it:

Books forming the architecture of the library. Fantastic. I know I am often a little too liberal with my superlatives, but this stamp is pretty darn magnificent. To be honest, I don't know which stamp I love more: the bibliotheque or the palaeontologist. A very hard call. But I am thrilled to now have them both in my collection.

João also threw in one more little surprise, a strip of stamps featuring female aviators.

What a fantastic treat in my mailbox from  João. Thank you so much! And it is lovely to share these little gems as part of Sunday Stamps this week. Check out other stamp blogs this Sunday, here:

Despatched by Tin Can Mail

Kym bought in the coolest bit of "show and tell" to work recently - her Grandfather's cover from 6th September 1937. It was thrown overboard in a sealed tin can from the Cruise Steamer "Maunganui"to be collected by canoe from the Tongan island of Niuafoou (or Niuafo'ou) before it found its way to the faraway Victorian country town of Kerang.

This is possibly the coolest item of post I have ever seen. And I don't think I am overstating it. I had heard this story of the Tin Can Island from Meredith, when she shared her son's stamp collection with us a few months ago. But to see an actual piece of Tin Can Mail... what a treat!!

How wonderful are all the stamps on the reverse? There is even a little bit of Cyrillic thrown in!

So I am very delighted to discover that Meredith's fantastical story of the Tin Can Island is in fact true - I have seen the post to prove it! Thanks so much Kym for sharing this wonderful little treasure (I do so love "show and tell")!

Bunyips

Happy New Year, Sunday Stampers. This is my first time participating in Sunday Stamps for 2013 - and it is almost February! The theme this week for Sunday Stamps this week is "cartoons and cartoon-like drawings." I have to admit that generally speaking, I don't usually rate cartoon stamps. They are just not really my thing.

However, flicking through my album, I found these stamps from 1994, which I still quite like. I think I liked them very much back in Year 8, when I got them.

They depict the mythical creature, the Bunyip. The Bunyip from Berkeley's Creek is a classic Australian children's story book and features on one of the stamps. I still get a pang of sympathy for the poor misunderstood Bunyip from Berkeley's Creek when I think about him. Needless to say, this is my favourite stamp of the four from the issue.

I have the stamp pack for these stamps, because I thought stamp packs were cool when I was in Year 8. The first stamp is a representation of the bunyip from Aboriginal myth, the second is one called the "Nature Spirit Bunyip".  The last stamp is an artist's interpretation of reported sightings of the Bunyip, so is the depiction of the "Natural History Bunyip".

The more I reflect on these stamps, the more I like them. I love a good mythical creature. Happy Sunday, everyone... and beware of the bunyips out there.

Recent Acquisitions

It is perhaps clear that although I have titled this post "recent acquisitions" some of the stamps I am featuring are not that recent, given that I am beginning this post with the Australian Olympics stamps, which are obviously several months old by now. Although I am not really a sporting sort of girl, I was really impressed with Australia Post's offering this Olympics, as I really like the watercolour splattered effect and the bright colours used.

The "enrol to vote" stamp, another one that I really like, was actually issued all the way back in March. But the reason that I still think of these stamps as "recent" is that I tend to buy my stamps only once every few months. All the stamps that I am featuring in this post I bought recently (in a sense) but they also feel new to me, because they haven't made it into my album yet. Until I got them out to scan they were still sitting in their packets.

The above stamps are portraits of Australian Nobel Laureates. I bought the above set because it had a cool illustration in the gutter. And I love a good gutter strip. But I also really like the portraits, which are painted by some very highly-regarded Australian artists (Brett Whiteley and Clifton Pugh among them).  I just think they are a lovely set of stamps. So lovely, in fact, that I accidentally went a little crazy and purchased the First Day Cover as well!

Okay, fancy Gutter Strip set AND First Day Cover? Uh-oh... this could be a sign that I am turning into a crazy cat lady. Without a cat, but with a stamp collection. But checkout how the postmark on the FDC matches the gutter strip image. Cool, huh?

Anyhow, in the latest edition of the "Stamp Bulletin" published by Australia Post (damn, I can hear those crazy-cat-lady alarm-bells ringing again) the results of a public poll on the favourite Australian stamp issue of 2012 were released, and it was the following:

It is quite a fun series, but I don't think it is my favourite issue of the year. Maybe this issue beats it for me:

These little fellows are "nudibranchs" which are tiny (25mm - 120mm) marine molluscs. Aren't they trippy? Like strange little aliens. According to my edition of the Stamp Bulletin from May (from when they were issued... yep it really has been a while since I sorted through my stamps), nudibranchs...

can be found in all habitats from the deepest ocean to the shorelines of every continent.  They come in many sizes are beautiful to behold and have developed survival strategies which defy the imagination.

I still don't quite want to commit to the tiny nudibranchs as my favourite stamp issue of the year. I like them much better than the road trip stamps, but perhaps the Nobel Laureates are my favourite stamps of the year. Perhaps. As always, I find it hard to pick a favourite!

Hello 2013!

Hello lovely readers and hello 2013!
Here we are at the beginning of a new year, and I can smell the fresh start.

And with the fresh start of the new calendar year comes a whole new look and feel to "I heart post." What do you think? I hope you like it! I have spent quite a while working on it to get to this stage, so I am very happy to launch the look with my first post of 2013.

I did a little course in CSS conducted by the clever Katrina at Pugly Pixel to work out how to refresh my look. Roll-over my widgets! Roll-over my widgets! Look how they change colour! I am pretty excited by that! So thank-you Katrina for teaching me such fancy tricks.

With the goal of revamping "I heat post" achieved (for the time being - it is undoubtedly a work-in-progress), and with the start of the new year, it is also time to think about new goals. So I have set a goal for myself. A serious goal.

And the goal is this (and people who know me well may snigger, as I never ever ever ever thought this phrase would come out of my mouth/keyboard):

♥ I want to do a 10km fun run this year!!*

Fun run - an oxymoron, I know!! But I have already signed up to do two 4km races and an 8km race in February/March - so I better get serious about achieving this goal, or it might be embarrassing. And now that I have put this goal out there on the world wide web, there is no escaping.

I also have a standard goal which I have re-hashed at the start of the past few years, and that is:
           ♥ read more books.
I read embarrassingly little last year, so this one shouldn't be hard to achieve.

And rounding out my list of goals, I would also like to:
            ♥ fix up my garden,
            ♥ make a meal from an actual recipe.

Okay, so I just made those last two up. Fixing up the garden has been on my to-do list for two months now, so maybe making it an official new years goal will actually see it happen. And just because I like to round things out, to get to goal number five, I used the 'New Year's Resolution Generator' and the result was:

I quite like that! This year I will aim to be more curious! I have no idea how I will measure that.

So thanks for spending time with "I heart post" once again. Please let me know what you think of the blog re-design** or if you have any tips on how I could be more curious. And please share your own goals for 2013 with me too - it will make me feel like less of a crazy-woman for wanting to do a 10km run!

Until next time, peeps,

Helen.

*And PS, I learnt how to do in-text hearts ♥ ♥ ♥ during my little CSS course, so watch out, they are going to be everywhere on this site, because I am a more than a little excited about them. I ♥ hearts.

**And PPS, I also made a new "About" page - check it out!