Postcrossing Blog

Hoera! Following the success of the first stamp ever dedicated to Postcrossing, PostNL is issuing a second sheet of stamps to honor the project this year!

The new sheet of 10 different stamps features an eclectic mix of popular Dutch highlights, connected through postcards. There are national parks and picturesque villages, fields of tulips and marvels of engineering… and everything in between! Without further ado, here they are:

Do you recognise all the sights?

From the top left corner (left to right, and top-down), they are: Delta Works, Frisian Islands, Hoge Veluwe, Binnenhof, Alkmaar’s cheese market, Bollenvelden, Giethoorn, Marken, Zaanse Schans… and our personal favourite, a character from Rembrandt’s most famous painting The Night Watch, wishing us all a “Happy Postcrossing”!

Keeping in mind that Postcrossing postcards travel mostly to foreign destinations, PostNL created a set of stamps that double as tiny tourism ambassadors, helping draw attention to the country’s most interesting and attractive sites. The resulting design (by Reinier Hamel from Sin agency) is a bright sheet of stamps, which promises to bring a conversation topic (and burst of colour!) to many future postcards.

The new stamp sheet will be available on all Bruna shops from March 29th, and you can also pre-order it online (along with a neat First Day Cover) from March 22nd on CollectClub.nl.

To celebrate the stamp launch, Dutch postcrossers are organising a meetup in Rotterdam on March 29th, and planning to send lots of postcards with the shiny new stamps. Do join them, if you can!

If you’re not in the Netherlands, keep an eye on your mailbox — your next Dutch postcards might feature their new Postcrossing stamps! 😀

February is finally behind us, and it’s time we announce how many cards were sent from Germany last December… and of course how much money they raised on the Postcards for a good cause campaign!

Ready? Go on, think of a number and then scroll down to find out!

Postcrossers in Germany sent 88570 postcards during December, raising a total of €8857 for Stiftung Lesen! That’s a record! 😀

Congratulations to all the postcrossers and a huge thank you to Deutsche Post, for committing to this cause. What a brilliant number… you really outdid yourselves this year!

As usual, it will take us a couple of days to sort out the prizes. We’ll get in touch with all the winners via email soon.

Have you ever heard of the Graceful Envelope Contest? Maybe you’ve seen some of these stunning envelopes before…

The contest is held every year by the Washington (DC) Calligraphers Guild and open to worldwide entries. Participants of all ages are invited to use their calligraphy and artistic skills to interpret a given theme on an envelope, which is then mailed to the Guild. Bonus points for using stamps that fit the topic!

This year, the theme is Communication:

“Ever since Benjamin Franklin became America’s first Postmaster General, many of our most important messages arrived inside an envelope. Now your challenge is to design the outside of an envelope to highlight this—or any other—mode of communication. Your Graceful Envelope could honor the mail or the internet; the telegraph, telephone or television; person-to-person conversation or whatever kind of communication inspires your imagination.”

The deadline for 2016 is March 28th… so gather your stamps, envelopes and colouring pens, and give it a go! :)

You can read the contest rules and how to participate on the Washington Calligraphers Guild website, and check out some of the previous entries on their Flickr page. A big thank you scribefriend from bringing this wonderful contest to our attention!

Remember the cute kids who serenaded Postcrossing last year with a lovely rendition of Happy Birthday, both in English and Maori?

Awwww… 😍

The little ones come from Koputaroa, a rural area in the North Island of New Zealand. Their Postcrossing account, Kererū, is both the name of their learning centre and the name of a bird native to the islands. The class has been on Postcrossing for 2 years now, and sent over 400 postcards… they’re very enthusiastic! :) We talked to their teachers about their class and Postcrossing.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

We came across Postcrossing after making connections with kindergartens and other childhood centres around the world. While many who responded to us were in USA, we wanted to communicate with more centres around the world. A Google search turned up Postcrossing and so our exciting journey began. The children’s delight in receiving postcards of different peoples and places around the world kept us hooked.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

We have 3 teachers who have different hobbies. Helen is keen to travel the world and later this year is heading over to Europe with her family for a holiday. Sharee loves listening to music and adores One Direction and Ed Sheeran. I (Faye) personally like to read science fiction books and also enjoy being on my computer.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

This is the mailbox in Foxton where all our cards are sent from. My husband considers it a personal job for him to actually put the cards in the box each time!

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

The children love visiting the mailbox at the end of the drive to see if the mail van has left anything for them. They also love choosing the cards that gets sent to the receiving participant. A lot of thought goes into choosing just the right one.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

This is the prize we won for our video contribution to Postcrossing’s 10th birthday. The children absolutely love it and gather around it at reading time each day to see where Wally is. They consider it a challenge to see how fast they can find Wally!

Have you been surprised by any place that you have received a postcard from or sent a postcard to?

We are absolutely thrilled to receive our two cards from the African continent, and hope for many more. The children have loved the many Finnish postcards that we received before Christmas that had Santa on them.

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

We work with children aged between 2–5 years so anything that interests them on a daily basis is what we are passionate about. With Postcrossing, they love receiving cards which show different foods, dress, cultures, buildings and animals.

February is here… which means it’s time for another Month of Letters challenge! Are you in? :)

On September 2011, Mary Robinette Kowal decided it was time for a break. She spent the entire month offline, and asked her friends to communicate with her through letters. The results of this personal challenge were a revelation:

When I write back, I find that I slow down and write differently than I do with an email. Email is all about the now. Letters are different, because whatever I write needs to be something that will be relevant a week later to the person to whom I am writing. In some ways it forces me to think about time more because postal mail is slower. “By the time you get this…” It is relaxing. It is intimate. It is both lasting and ephemeral.

How so? I find that I will often read the letters that I receive twice. Once when I get them and again as I write back. So, that makes it more lasting. It is more ephemeral because I don’t have copies of the letters that I write and I am the only one who has copies of the letters that my correspondents write. So, more ephemeral.

I know a lot of postcrossers share these feelings – this is part of the reason why Postcrossing exists!

Mary’s decided to turn February into a Month of Letters, in which she challenges herself and everyone who decides to join to write and send at least a piece of postal mail every day. Here are the rules:

Mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

We can’t help but feel that postcrossers have their work cut out for them in this challenge… :) Nevertheless, we wanted to dare you all to do it! Write postcards, letters or aerogrammes or surprise a friend with an unexpected package. Maybe even pick a Facebook/Twitter friend and send them an offline “hello!”.

Are you up to Mary’s challenge? Grab your stationery and stamps and start writing! :)