World Stamp Expo Fun Times!

 

So this blogging game has gotten away from me recently, and as a result there is a bit of catching up to do. About a month ago I was very excited to attend the World Stamp Expo, which was being held in my hometown of Melbourne. The WORLD STAMP EXPO!

The Expo was held at the Royal Exhibition Building, a beautiful UNESCO World Heritage listed building located in the Carlton Gardens. I dragged my dutiful boyfriend along, who patiently accompanied through the myriad stalls from various postal authorities from around the globe. I also dragged my friend Grant along - but he chose to lie in the sun for a couple of hours in the Gardens instead. Each to their own (but you missed out on some fun, Grant!).

As you could well imagine, I made a few purchases over the course of the day. My little bag was full (and my bank account empty) by the end of it. I got a souvenir minisheet to add to my royal kitsch collection, embossed with the Expo logo on it.  And I just couldn't help myself, also adding to my royal collection I got a Wills and Kate FDC.

Moving away from my tacky fascination with royals, I also indulged my love of maps, and found this amazingly beautiful minisheet from Greenland. What a find!

I also visited Deutsche Post, and purchased this lovely minisheet as it features both a map element and the Antarctic, and I love the Antarctic. The combinations of boats and ice always make for beautiful images. Would you agree?

I also found these awesome Indonesian stamps, which I saw when I visited there last year, but resisted buying at the time due to budgetary constraints.

The stamps depict traditional fabric designs from around Indonesia. They are quite lovely, in my opinion.

Anyhow that is a sample of my many purchases from the World Stamp Expo 2013.  It was a very fun day out for a big stamp nerd like me.

And now this stamp nerd is signing off for the time being. I am about to head to Turkey for six and a half weeks! I am very excited and will be working on a Roman archaeological site on the south coast. It is an absolute dream come true and I can't wait to be archaeologising on the other side of the world. So I will try and post to this blog (probably fairly irregularly) over the coming few weeks, but the posts will be archaeologic rather than philatelic in nature. But watch this space!

Birthday Giveaway Time !

This week marks the beginning of my 33rd year of being. I feel that is something of an occasion, and just for the heck of it, I am going to try something radical and new...

I am going to do a giveaway!!

Yay!

Happy Birthday to my lovely blog readers.

As a little token of my appreciation for your continued support, I thought I would cook up a little tasty treat. And because it is my birthday, and because I love Royal Kitsch, that is what I have chosen for the theme.

The task is simple - leave a comment to enter (compulsory), and follow along on bloglovin or google friend connect for a bonus entry. And if you are already a follower - then no problemo, leave a comment and you will receive two entries.

The lucky prize winner will receive:

1) Charlie and Lady Di stamp pack (see above).

2) Five hand made envelopes featuring royals taken from vintage books purchased last year (see below).

3) A bundle of QEII stamps - use them as seals on the envelopes, as decorations, turn them into gift tags, make mini royal bunting from them... oh goodness, the options are endless. Just enjoy them!

I am going to draw the winner using random.org, and the competition will be open for 10 days.

Thanks for playing along. All the best from I heart post headquarters,

xx Helen

UPDATE: The winner has now been announced here: and it is Laura L. ... not because she was the first person to comment, but because that is who random.org chose! Thanks to all for participating!

Guest Collection: Danni's 1990s FDCs

One of the lovely things about doing this blog is that now many people tell me about their stamp collections. "Oh, I had a stamp collection when I was young" they'll say. But the truth is, they always still have the collection, tucked away somewhere, they just haven't added to it for a while.

Now, this may surprise some of you, but not too long ago, I used to keep my stamp collecting a bit of a secret. I mean - you don't really want to shout from the rooftops that you're a giant nerd, do you? Not if you're sane.

Christmas 1993 - a better effort than Christmas 2012, Australia Post 

But since I decided to blow caution to the wind and broadcast my insane pleasure in small perforated postage stamps, I have discovered I am not alone. People more often than not want to share their collections with me, and I think they find some pleasure in having an excuse to dust them off and rediscover them.

As is so often the case with FDCs, this one features a nice postmark!

So this is exactly what happened with my new(ish) housemate Danni a couple of months ago. I was hanging out in the kitchen and Danni brought in her collection of First Day Covers for me to look at. They are from the early 90s and they are kept in a Lindt Chocolate box.

This was in the early stages of living here, so it was in many ways a nice "getting to know you" exercise:
Danni - So, you blog about stamps.
Helen - Yup. It's not as tragic as it sounds. Or at least I don't think it is. I guess it might be...
Danni - Well, guess what? I have these First Day Covers!
Helen - Wow! FDCs! Awesome!
--
Or, at least, it went something like that.

So today I share with you, fellow lovers of post, Danni's collection of First Day Covers.

And here is my pick of the lot - the Queen's Birthday 1991. Would you take a look at the Mother-Daughter outfits with the matching black satin gloves. I am almost speechless. I certainly have FDC envy.

You know how I love a bit of Royal Kitsch! And check out those dresses!!

Thanks for sharing your cool collection of 90s FDCs with me Danni. They are ace!

Plura Scriptum Epistola

Hello Friends!
I am feeling the love at the moment, or more precisely my mailbox is feeling the love, and I just wanted to say thank-you to all the wonderful people who have sent me mail lately.

Postcard from Rohan, my semi-retired jungle-explorer friend (for real!)

This blog is not really supposed to be about the mail I receive, but the thing of it is, stamps and mail go hand in hand.

I love stamps, and I love post. Part of what makes stamps so special though, is that they adorn envelopes, which in turn promise to hold gems of  correspondence. Hand-written personal notes. Ah, the warm and fuzzy feelings I get when I receive hand-written personal notes in my mailbox!

And I certainly felt very warm and fuzzy the other night, when I went to my special "I heart post" post box and found the following amazing card waiting for me, from Carla at 365 Letters; not least of all because this was my first piece of post directly from the blogosphere.

There are so many things that I love about the card, that I feel it warrants a list:

1) Check out the awesome vintage-ness of the colours, the rounded corners and the image. BRILLIANT.

2) This came from Carla's holiday in June 1980... and she labellled the back of the card with that information when she bought it. Swoon. I love a bit of historical record-keeping.

3) THE STAMPS ARE AMAZING (and worthy of an exclamation in capitals). Click on the image above to check them out properly. They are worth it.

4) Did I mention it was the first piece of mail from a random fellow blogger?? 

Yep, I am feeling all warm and fuzzy just looking over it again. Thank-you Carla, you made my day (slash week)!

My parents are travelling at the moment, and they sent me the above lovely postcard from Austria featuring a Gustav Klimt painting... and the Wiener Werkstätte logo on the reverse, with a very nice stamp indeed. And they also sent me a Swedish map postcard. Thank-you parents! Three of my favourite things!

The thing is, with this blog, I have been thinking alot about why I like post so much. The correspondence part is definitely an element. And with that in mind, I recently joined the Letter Writers Alliance, because, I feel like with all this banging on about post that I do, I really should be sending some!

 

And my membership card arrived in the mail last week... and the envelope was enough to make me happy (I am a girl of simple pleasures, it is true).

I can tell you that I do plan on using my "Letter Writers Alliance" membership/superpower for good and not evil. And they have a Latin motto: Plura Scriptum Epistola. I did a Latin major at university, and the only thing I really remember is "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus". Yep. That is the Hogwarts motto. Never disturb a sleeping dragon. In muggle idiom that would be, "let sleeping dogs lie".

Anyhow, I am all for Latin mottos, and I am very happy to be part of an organisation that has one. So, Plura Scriptum Epistola. I am going to take this on as a personal motto forthwith; and I shall, I shall, write more letters. They probably won't be in Latin.

Thankyou Laura!

Thankyou Sandra - a postcard AND stamps. Yippee!

Oh yes, my friends do know that I love a bit of royal kitsch!

Thankyou Sandy

Thankyou to all the lovely people that have sent me things in the post recently. I do so love post. xx

And last but not least, just in, vintage-post Post from Jaz!  Yay!

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?