Postcrossing Blog

The winner of last weekend’s PostCarden set was kate101 – thank you to everyone who participated throughout the week!

For this weekend’s giveaway, we’d like to introduce House of St Junior, a small company based in London. It was founded by Scott Sloan and Neil Gillespie, who explain the concept behind the company:

We love artwork, but sometimes we can’t afford it, nevermind get it framed. So we started St.Junior, postable, framed mini-artworks… to help you start your collection!

Scott and Neil invented a genius product which they named the postframe. These consist of special edition postcards, framed in black matte foam and covered with a sheet of shatterproof lightweight perspex. Postframes can be easily mailed just like a normal postcard – ours arrived fast and in perfect condition!

Here’s how it works:

Neat, right? And the best part is, today we have 3 postframes to give away!

For a chance to grab one, visit the House of St Junior’s homepage and leave a comment below telling us what your favorite postframe is! :)

Comments will be open until midnight UTC September 10. Good luck!

For the second post of the Stationery makers series, we’ve talked with Liz, from dicky bird. We found her online shop by accident, but were immediately drawn to her fresh and eye-catching illustrations. Her collection of greeting cards put a big smile so big on our face, so we knew we had to feature her on the blog :)

Liz started her stationery business a year ago, but says that it was years in the planning in her head! She creates the illustrations on her Mac and then the cards are printed in heavy uncoated paper, for a muted and slightly textured feeling.

Below are her answers to our interview.

How did you get started doing stationery design?

I worked in Graphics for 10 years, so I knew a fair bit about print production, design and marketing. My love of bold colours and simple shapes led me to illustration and, later, the creation of ‘dicky bird’.

Where do you find your inspiration?

Oh, in so many things – nature, 50s and 60s patterns and textiles, Dick Bruna, Japanese life, Mid-century design and all things Scandinavian. I take a lot of photos and sometimes I get ideas that way. I also love living in London – there are so many interesting things to see and do – odd little museums, galleries (huge public ones and small independent ones), beautiful parks and quirky shops.

If you could define your style in 3 words, what would they be?

simple / graphic / positive

Are you a postcard or letter writer yourself?

I’m definitely a card writer. Not keen on the phone at all! I still love to send and receive things in the post – it’s so much nicer.

Can you show us a picture of your studio or workspace?

I work from home on a laptop, so my workplace can be the kitchen table or the sofa!

You can find dicky bird’s greeting cards at dicky-bird.co.uk. Liz also writes and shows bits of inspiration at dicky-bird.blogspot.com

Remember PostCarden, the postcard + garden combo? Another Studio for Design, the company behind this lovely invention has just come up with MatchCarden, a garden in a little matchbox!

Aren’t they the cutest? We wouldn’t mind growing a few of these on our desks!

To celebrate this new launch, they’re offering a set of PostCardens (includes 4 cards: Allotment, City, Football and Botanical) to one lucky postcrosser. To participate, visit their site, and tell us:

What architectural building from your country do you think should be turned into a PostCarden or MatchCarden?

Answers on the comments, until midnight September 3rd UTC. Good luck!

Today’s spotlight comes from Evanscrew, a family of four from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They like hiking and have an unusual hobby called Letterboxing. Intrigued? Find out all about it on this week’s spotlight!

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

We are a family of four and I love finding activities that are fun for us all, but also activities that we can both learn from and give back to. We participate in a hobby called Letterboxing (see next question) and there is a discussion board on one of the websites for that hobby that is all about Postcrossing. That is how I learned of Postcrossing.
What got me hooked was how educational it is—not only do we receive interesting postcards, but we also enjoy the great notes that most postcrossers include on the cards. I share the cards with my children, we put a pin in our world map if the card comes from a new place, and we learn about the place on the card.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

We love to read, go hiking and biking, and explore new places. One of the best hobbies we have found that combines many of our loves is called Letterboxing. Clues may be found on the internet that lead you to plastic boxes containing a rubber stamp (often hand-carved) and a logbook. As letterboxers, we carry a logbook and family stamp representing our trail name. When we find a box, we stamp our stamp into the box’s logbook and the box’s stamp into our logbook then carefully close and rehide the box for its next finders. We love to find and also plant these boxes. It is very important to be careful when letterboxing—both to maintain the natural elements around the boxes as well as to keep the letterboxes themselves safe. People intending to try this hobby should read up on the generally accepted etiquette for finding boxes and teach their children (if there are any) as well!

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

This is the Main Post Office in Falmouth. There are several smaller post offices in Falmouth that we sometimes use as well. Several postal employees automatically take out the stamp for hand-cancelling the cards when they see me coming!

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

We love all of our cards!! We are active in the forum as well, and love seeing what people choose for us!
This is of the World Map we have hanging in our home where the children put pins to mark where our postcards come from.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

Honestly, it gives me a thrill to choose cards and stamps that I think a person will enjoy based on their profiles. And what fun—that is all we know about that person—what is in the profile—yet for a moment in time we are connected to someone in another part of the world as we prepare the card, knowing it will travel a great distance and hopefully bring a smile! Receiving cards that have obviously been chosen based on our interests is a thrill as well—that someone we don’t know in a place we may never visit has taken time to think of us—how cool is that!

Another exciting report from our dear little mail carriers! Australia is so big that they’ve decided to stay a little longer there, and visit another friendly postcrosser, Smileyfflagge! Meanwhile, they’ve been on newspapers headlines and gave radio interviews… seems like everybody wants to meet them! :) Read their story below:

We left Mundoo in South Australia on Thursday 23 June 2011 and arrived in Coffs Harbour NSW on Monday 27 June 2011. Smileyfflagge got a big surprise when he opened his mailbox this morning!

Smiley lives at Upper Orara, which is about 25kms west of Coffs Harbour. There is no town of Upper Orara; it is a “locality”, a name given to a district for land record purposes, and so people have an address. There are about 800 residents in the area, and they have fat cattle farms or dairy farms. Upper Orara is very pretty and is situated in the Orara Valley.

Smileyfflagge’s little house is situated right in the middle of a huge dairy farm and sometimes the dairy cows come right up to the boundary fence to see what is going on.

Australians love BIG THINGS and the very first Big Thing built in Australia was the “Big Banana” which is in Coffs Harbour, so we went to see how big it really is.

There is a café near the Big Banana, so we looked at all the postcards they had for sale before we had our afternoon tea.

Smiley took us out into a banana plantation so we could climb a banana tree. The blue plastic bag protects the bananas.

Another day we went to look at the view over Coffs Harbour from Sealy Lookout but it was closed for refurbishment. We found a little clearing in the trees so we could take a photo of the view looking north and while we were there we met Claude and Barbara, who were visiting Coffs Harbour from Western Australia, so we had our photo taken with them. We are hoping that they will join Postcrossing after meeting us!

On Wednesday 13 July we went to the Coffs Harbour Jetty for a newspaper interview. We were met there by Gemima Harvey, a journalist with the “The Coffs Coast Advocate”, and her photographer Bruce Thomas. We had a very nice interview and Bruce took our photograph with glenasena and Smileyfflagge. The newspaper printed our story on the front page! And it was on the front page of 9 other newspapers right up the coast from Coffs Harbour to Gladstone in Queensland! And in the papers in the inland cities of Ipswich and Toowoomba in Queensland. We sent Gemima and Bruce a postcard to say “Thank You”!

On Friday 15 July we went to present our credentials to the Mayor of Coffs Harbour, Councillor Keith Rhoades. Cr Rhoades signed our travel documents for us. The Mayor is a very busy man and we are grateful that he was able to take the time to meet with us. We sent him a postcard to say “Thank You” too!

The following Friday (22 July) we went to the “ABC Radio Coffs Harbour” studio for an interview. We went on air and tried to chat with Katya Quigley from “ABC Radio Port Macquarie” on her morning program. She couldn’t hear us, even though we were talking as loud as we could, so Smileyfflagge had to do the interview on our behalf. This next photo shows us in Liz Keen’s studio in Coffs Harbour.

On Monday 25 July Smiley drove us all the way up to Ipswich in Queensland, so we could visit our dear friend crizle who has been very ill in hospital. She was very happy to see us and is now home and very much better.

The next photograph shows us at the beginning of the boardwalk at Urunga, which is about 25kms south of Coffs Harbour. The boardwalk now goes right out to the end of the training wall, and the second picture shows us waving to all our postcrossing friends in New Zealand, which is out that way somewhere.

Smiley took us to the Post Office in Urunga to meet the Postmistress, Christine. She stamped our travel documents for us.

Here we are looking out over Park Beach on a cloudy day. In the summer months Park Beach is full of people enjoying the sunshine and the surf.

Our very last photograph shows us looking out over the marina at Coffs Harbour, with Muttonbird Island in full view. Just to the left centre of the photograph you can see the Coffs Harbour Jetty, where we had our interview for the newspaper.

Now we are getting ready to leave Australia for…