Postcrossing Blog

Remember many moons ago, when we were gearing up for the 150 years of postcards exhibition at UPU? Among the many postcards we received that year was this lovely handmade piece by Annie (aka freezeframe03) from the USA:

Isn’t it just stunning, the way it combines the stamps with fabric, and the binding all around it? 😍 We were in awe of it!

Annie has done many fabric cards over the years and feeling inspired by them, I asked her if she could whip up a mini-tutorial to help me and other newbies get started on making one of them. She agreed, made a postcard just for it and wrote the tutorial below, which I’m happy to share with everyone. Enjoy!

"There are many ways to make a fabric postcard. I’ve made this updated tutorial to show how I make them. They are a lot simpler to make than you might think!

The supplies you will need are as follows:

• Fabric scraps for your postcard front design
• 4”×6” (10×15cm) front base fabric
• 4”×6” (10×15cm) piece of stiff Peltex
• 4”×6” (10×15cm) light to medium weight fusible interfacing
• 4”×6” (10×15cm) piece of paper or card stock (not too thin) for the address and message side
• A bit of transfer webbing, if you decide on a pictorial design (I use the lightweight Wonder Under).

Trace your design on the paper side of the transfer webbing. Loosely cut outside your traced lines. (Your design will be backwards from the way you trace it, so be sure to trace any alphabets backwards to begin with.)

Fuse your traced designs to your fabric choices.

Then cut them out on the lines. Allow the pieces to cool until they will release from the paper easily.

I press my design base fabric to the Peltex. It is not fused, but the layers will stay together better until you begin sewing on them.

Trim the interfacing a smidge before fusing it to one side of your paper. You don’t want any hanging over, it will fuse to your ironing surface. Set the paper message side aside until needed.

With the paper removed from the back of your cutout pieces, arrange them on the base fabric and Peltex where you want them and fuse them to the base fabric. Be sure to leave 3/8” (about 1cm) around all sides as that is the space the binding will cover.

Now you will stitch around your design as desired. You can fuse all of your design at once or you can fuse the pieces as you are ready to sew them.

This method is raw edge appliqué, and it is my favorite to use on postcards. Pull your thread tails to the back on the Peltex side and tie them off.

My next pieces on this postcard I fused the webbing to the back of fabric scraps, then cut them with a cutting die through a cutting machine.

When the papers were ready to release, I fused the flowers where I wanted them on the base fabric. I then stitched the stems and the flowers.

Once you are finished with your postcard design, align the front and back and stitch them together roughly around the very outside edge. This will hold the loose fabric edges in place while adding the binding. It will be covered later by the binding.

Most people will just zigzag (satin stitch) around the outside of their postcard to finish it. You can do that now, or follow my binding method that I show in detail on my blog, step by step. I like my binding method as it finishes the edges as well as giving the design a framing.

The end result will look like this:

To finish it up, I put a very tiny amount of Fray Check (glue also works) on the binding ends to keep them from raveling. Put a bit on, then wipe it with your finger. You don’t want too much, it will make the corners hard.

And, DONE! With a paper backing, adding some extra fun on the address side of the card is simple.

If you have any questions at all or need some further detailed info, I am more than happy to help out with both.

Happy Mail Day!
Annie"

Thank you Annie, that looks amazing… and maybe not even that complicated? I’m planning to gather the materials I need this week, dust off my sewing machine and give it a go with a simple design over the weekend. Who wants to join me in a little crafty session? 😊 Make sure to check out Annie’s blog for tons more creative inspiration and lovely handmade postcards!

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

This month, we’ve chosen a prompt from a forum post by esca0417 which really piqued our interest. We all have special topics that we know a lot about, from postcards to trains to almost anything else you can imagine… but what are the topics that you don’t yet know about, the ones where you’d love to learn everything and become an expert? What would you pick?

For me, it’s really difficult to choose… I have so many interests I know a little about, and I’d love to know more about any one of them. Some have been preoccupations since childhood (Ancient Egypt and dinosaurs), and some are more recent (the history of fabrics and food, for instance). And for me, the journey is half the fun, so I wouldn’t choose to skip to the end of my degree and be an expert in epidemiology right now!

I think in the end I’d choose something that gives me a chance to learn even more about something that I already find interesting—I’d love to become an expert in Egyptian hieroglyphs, so that I can actually read ancient inscriptions for myself. I’m not great at learning languages or deciphering visual things, so in this case I’d really appreciate the boost of a magic wish to become an expert overnight.

Of course, now I’ve picked something, I can think of a dozen other subjects I’d love to become an expert in… maybe I’ll write about some of those on the postcards I send this month! If you’re not sure what to write on your own postcards this month, maybe you can do the same? We’d love to see your ideas about what you’d become an expert in here in the comments, as well!

Sometime ago, I noticed people posting photos of their cute postboxes on Twitter, under the hashtag #PostboxSaturday, and I immediately wanted in too! :D Saturday is my favourite postcard-writing day, and a visit to the postbox is part of the weekend ritual. Turns out Dinah, from the wonderful Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society, started the whole #PostboxSaturday movement with this tweet:

She says she almost deleted it at the time, but we’re really glad she didn’t, because on Saturday our social feeds are now overflowing with postbox loveliness. 😍 Surely, there isn’t a better way to start the weekend!

She later wrote on her website:

“I’ve always loved the romance of a postbox but a postbox in a rural or remote or picturesque setting really does pull on my heart strings. Perhaps it’s the result of reading Rosamund Pilcher novels, or years spent on trips to the mountains, or working in the outdoors, and of course the backdrop of always writing letters that collided to make #PostboxSaturday, but it’s just the loveliest feeling being transported off to a little red postbox some place else. Maybe even more so these days.”

So your mission, if you wish to accept it, is to take a photo of your postbox and share it with others on social media this Saturday, using the hashtag #PostboxSaturday! Bonus points if you’re mailing some postcards too. 📮

Let’s spread some postal charm around, and make sure that postboxes from all around the world are featured in this nice initiative!

Hey everyone! It’s Nicky back again with a new book review. Last time I was talking about Sir Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, and this time (as promised at the end of the last post) I’m here to talk about Vigdis Hjorth's Long Live the Post Horn! I read it in the English translation by Charlotte Barslund: it’s a Norwegian novel centred around a woman who doesn’t really know what she wants from life or what she’s doing, until she finds a new purpose in protesting against a new EU directive which will change the Norwegian postal service.

I have to admit, I wasn’t a huge fan of this book. I think that’s mostly just personal taste: the translation is really readable, and it does really well at portraying a kind of dreamlike stream-of-consciousness narrative in which the main character, Ellinor, is drifting through life without doing anything of consequence. She’s not really connected to her job writing copy as a publicity consultant, she’s not really engaged with her relationships with her family or her boyfriend, and she doesn’t really know what the point of it all is. Hjorth manages to make that beautifully believable, to the point where I found it a little depressing to read myself. Once Ellinor’s inspired, her almost feverish activity comes through in the narrative as well.

Ellinor’s life is shaken up by the suicide of a member of her three-person publicity firm. She ends up having to take over one of his projects: the effort to persuade politicians and trade unions to protest against a new directive which will allow other companies to compete with the Norwegian postal service. At first they’re very pessimistic about the idea of getting people fired up about the issue, but a story about a dead letter which the postman finally manages to deliver makes her see the value in the campaign, and she manages to get her co-worker engaged with it as well. The second half(ish) of the book shows Ellinor reconnecting with the people around her as well, including trading confidences with her boyfriend, which led to one of my favourite bits:

“Sometimes when I don’t know what to do, ” he said, “I’ll write myself a letter.”

“Why? To support the Post Office?”

It was his turn to laugh.

“No, ” he said, “but when I express myself as if I’m not me, the words come to me, ” he said, “when I pretend I’m someone else, then I express myself more clearly and I send the letter to myself so I can see what I mean.” he said.

“Couldn’t you just write the letter, put it away and then take it out another time?”

“I’ve tried that, ” he said, “but it’s not the same. I have to do the whole thing, the envelope, the stamp, the post box, and then it really does work.”

Writing letters (and postcards!) is different, somehow, especially when you take the time to put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it—it’s all much more deliberate than sending an email, for instance. I’ve never tried sending myself a proper letter, but I can see how it might work!

I can see this book working really well for a lot of readers; for me, it’s just not entirely my cup of tea. Still, it’s always interesting to try something new, and I was especially interested because I don’t think I’ve read any contemporary Norwegian fiction before.

I recently read Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine, and I’m hoping to review the first trilogy for my next post. After that… I’m still hoping to find some non-fiction about mail/postal services. I think Deirdre Mask’s The Address Book is close enough in theme, so a review for that should be coming up soon as well. It’s all about the history of street names and addresses, and what they can tell us about local history and politics, and I really liked it, so I’ll probably write that up soon!

If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them; feel free to leave a comment here, send me a message, or drop a note in the forum thread if anything comes to mind!

The day has finally arrived for this trio of colorful stamps to make their debut, and we couldn’t be more pleased about them! 😍 We got ours just yesterday, and here they are, in all their glory:

Pretty neat, right? The Chance Crab, Herm Puffin and Golden Guernsey Goat illustrations were made by Chris Griffiths from the local design studio Two Degrees North and the stamps look even better in person!

The three stamps, as well as FDCs, maxicards, normal postcards and presentation packs are available on Guernsey Post’s website, which ships internationally. I wish we could go to Guernsey to send a bunch of postcards… but we’ll settle for sending them to all our friends from here. We’ll probably have a few extra, so if you’d like to receive one, do leave a comment below — we’ll be happy to raffle a few postcards. 😊

We’re really looking forward to sending and seeing these fun stamps and postcards pop up in mailboxes all around the world!