Lovely Letters

I have a confession to make. Sometimes I like purchasing things online, just so I get to look forward to a package in the mail. That's a little tragic, isn't it? Well, lately I haven't been such a postal lame-o.

Task #1, received. Cool Aloha stamps!

For the past few weeks I have been participating in a letter exchange organised by Kitty and Buck. The premise is simple: after signing up to the challenge you were matched with a partner and then every fortnight for eight weeks a letter-writing task would be set. Write four letters. Get four letters. Sounded pretty neat to me, so I signed up. I dutifully sent off my first three letters but hadn't received anything. And then this week they all turned up! Mail. What a simple and lovely pleasure.

Task #1, sent. Awesome letter-pressed aerogram by the Hungry Workshop.

Task # 1: Introduce yourself. Include a photo.
Well, my letter-writing partner is ladykayy and she sent me an awesome introductory letter.
It arrived on a rainy day though... so the letter got quite wet and a little warped.

Ladykayy sent me lots of photos of her home and neighbourhood, but also of Malta, a place clearly close to her heart. The photos she sent me turned really psychedelic after getting wet - don't they look wonderful? Like little mixed-media masterpieces!

I am not sure what I am going to do with these little piccies, but I feel like I should make some creative use of them, because they are so beautiful with their unintentional water-colour effect!

Task #2: Ask your partner 10 questions. Task #3: Send your partner a list of your 10 favourite things.

Task #2 and Task #3 both arrived together on Monday. Fun!

I love the Churchill stamp adorning Letter #2. I am surprised the postal staff didn't go postal when they saw a foreign stamp stuck on the envelope. The postal staff at my post office once went crazy when I was just trying to reuse a Swedish envelope.. they'd have a conniption if they saw a random foreign stamp on the envelope too!

The contents of ladykayy's letters were, true to the nature of challenge, quite lovely. One of the letters was written on sheet music! I liked that. The first letter had a packet of stamps in it! There was a postcard and stationary and stickers! (oh my!)

So thank-you Ladykayy for sending me some very lovely letters, and thank-you to Shell at Kitty and Buck for organising the exchange. It has been very fun. And I still have Task #4 to look forward to (so I don't have to resort to ebay just yet, to get my postal fix!).

Island Airmail: Sunday Stamps

This Sunday I heart post comes to you direct from my Dad's study. I am home visiting  my parents, and also my sister who has just flown back to Australia after living in Sweden for the past couple of years. (Welcome home Elspeth!). So for this week's Sunday Stamps, I decided to flick through my Dad's collection of First Day Covers from when he was a boy, to find something suitable for the theme of 'the post'. Any regular readers of this blog would know that I am particularly fond of 'post' and choose to define it broadly.

Although I did not find any stamps with post boxes or stamps on them - I did find two covers celebrating airmail. The one above is from Western Samoa (which has now dropped the 'Western' from its name and is officially the Independent State of Samoa).

Also within Dad's collection I found another contemporaneous cover celebrating airmail from Papua and New Guinea, also issued in July 1970.

The stamps are very nice, with the planes flying over volcanoes (after my recent trip to Indonesia I am most definitely into volcanoes: almost to the point of starting a second blog called "I heart volcanoes"). But the other thing I like about the PNG cover is the stylised image of Australia and Papua and New Guinea linked by the plane. Pretty cool. 

I am seriously starting to wonder why I loved just plain old stamps all these years, when I could have been loving first day covers, which are stamps with the added bonus of designs on envelopes and fancy postmarks. Who knows why I was so slow to catch on, but the important thing is now my passion for post has enlarged to definitely include FDCs. And when airmail and volcanoes are involved, it is just the icing on top!

For other post related blogs this weekend, check out Viridian's Sunday Stamps through the button above. Happy Sunday!