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:

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.

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!

The Queen, Clunes and a Coronation Collection

This weekend my friend Jaz and I took a road trip to a small town in the Central Victorian goldfields district to check out the Clunes Booktown bookfair, which proved to be a very fun day out for a nerd like me. There was a veritable bonanza of second-hand books on offer, in the setting of a beautiful old town that has a streetscape barely changed since the gold-rush era. Joy.

I am not sure whether it was because I wrote about Royal Kitsch last week, and it was therefore in the forefront of my mind, or whether it was because I knew I wanted to share some coronation first day covers with you, my lovely blog readers; but either way, somehow I came home from Clunes with not one, or even two, but three books on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Whoops.

The end papers of the books are my favourite thing! They are so decorative! And one of them is even a map! There is so much to get excited about when the books are "colourgravure publications". These books are a techni-colour dream!

I must admit that I purchased many more items other than these coronation books (the temptations were great), and although these books aren't strictly speaking 'post', I love them and couldn't resist sharing them.  I do love a bit of "show and tell". And it was such a fantastic day, that I wanted to share something of that experience too. Next year I think we might have to spend the whole weekend at Clunes Booktown - one day wasn't enough.

And now to the post connection. The weekend before last Grandpa Jeff and Grandma Isobel gave me some more of Pa Bert's first day covers. Some of the most stand-out are the Qantas FDCs celebrating the Queen's Coronation. I now have eight of them - all from different colonies.

The details on these FDCs are so exquisite, that this blog doesn't do them justice. I think the design has been letter-pressed and the texture and feel of the old paper and print is special. Not to mention, the regal gold and red is just lovely.

The FDC from New Zealand has a really fantastic postmark on the front,  while the issue from Ceylon has all the stamps on the reverse of the envelope.

The Malayan FDC is beautiful, and covered with stamps on the front and back:

All of the FDCs are sealed, but some of them feel like they have cardboard in them - and a couple of them might have a pamphlet in them. But I am too afraid to open them to find out!

So somehow, now I have a collection of coronation books as well as a collection of coronation first day covers, and a collection of coronation stamps. Is there a word for a collection of collections?