Postcrossing Blog

Hurray, it’s Postcrossing’s birthday today!! 🎉 Sixteen years of postcards and friendly connections all over the world feels like a long, joyful adventure… one that we cherish immensely.

All these global ties have felt extra meaningful in the past year, and we’ve heard from so many of you, letting us know how much you appreciated having a happy hobby during these rough times. So our big thank you to all of you out there, feeding mailboxes with nice mail and spreading some joy in times of social distancing — you are what keeps Postcrossing going. We hope you’ll have a brilliant day, and treat yourself to an extra nice postcard, or a slice of cake! 🍰

The other good news of the day is that a new Postcrossing-themed stamp from Austria is being issued today! Designed by Theresa Radlingmaier, 165,000 of these have been printed (in sheets of 50) and they should be available in Austrian post offices and their online shop today.

If you’re in Austria and manage to find some of these shiny new stamps on your local post office, do share some photos of them with the rest of us on social media! We’d love to see how they look on your own postcards.

Today is the day the colorful new Postcrossing-themed stamp from Belarus makes its debut! 🎉

The new stamp, designed by Evgeniya Bedonik comes in a sheet with six stamps, and is the third about the project issued by Belpost. Unlike the last one, this one has perforations on it, which we appreciate! It is available from today onwards on post offices throughout Belarus, and hopefully soon on their webshop too.

We haven’t actually seen the physical stamp yet and are super curious about it… So if you’re in Belarus and can take some photos to share with the community, please do so and tag us on social media, so we can re-post them!

Update: Anna (aka ana_karp) posted some photos on the forum already!

We hope to see many of these stamps slowly making their way across the world to lots of happy mailboxes!

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!