Postcrossing Blog

The writing prompts are an ongoing experiment that invites 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!

We’re posting February’s writing prompt a couple of days ahead of schedule because other good things are coming… 😉  Stay tuned!

This month’s writing prompt was suggested by Norway_girl on the forum. Here it goes:

If possible, write about someone whose work you know and enjoy, so that others can discover it too! It could be a contemporary or classical author, or perhaps even a favourite poet, children’s book or cookbook’s author. Make it interesting and help others discover a bit of your country’s literary heritage.

In the past few years, as friends got married and started having babies, we’ve been slowly rediscovering Portuguese children’s books and fell in love with a publisher called “Planeta Tangerina” (Tangerine planet). Their books are filled with beautifully illustrated and irreverent stories, making it hard to pick just one… A particular author of theirs that we enjoy is Isabel Minhós Martins, whose many books are often translated into other languages. “Don’t cross the line!” is our favourite — a quirky story on dictatorship, revolutions and the power of people, taking place in felt-tip illustrations on the left and right sides of each two-page spread.

What about your country? Which authors have you been reading or having fun discovering? Which ones do you think the recipient of your postcard would like to hear about? Don’t be afraid to skip the classics and recommend some little-known authors on your postcards — if you like their works, it’s likely that some other postcrossers will too!

PS – Got some cool ideas for more prompts? Feel free to share them on this forum thread!

February is a busy month in the mail calendar, and we can’t wait for it to start! Are you ready? :)

I love a good mail challenge, and since February is the “Month of Letters”, it is time to dust off your special stationery and put pen to paper! It’s the perfect opportunity for reconnecting with family and friends, sending a Valentine card to your special someone, saying thank you to the helpful people in your life… or simply surprising strangers across the world with postcards! 😉

The rules of the Month of Letters challenge are simple:

• 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… anything goes!
• Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

That’s it! The challenge started back in 2012, after Mary Robinette Kowal decided it was time for a break from the internet. She spent a month offline, and asked her friends to communicate with her through letters. The results were relaxing and intimate, so she decided to invite others to join, sparking a flurry of correspondence.

Another happy mail-related event coming up is Mail Carrier Appreciation Day, which happens every year on February 4th. This is the day to celebrate our trusty postmen and women, who make it possible for this hobby to exist by delivering all our postcards!

The date falls on a Sunday this year… but don’t let that stop you from making something nice for your mail carrier. Pour your gratitude into a thank you note that you’ll deliver (or affix to your mailbox) on Monday February 5th, when they make their rounds. I’m sure it’ll be the highlight of their day!

If you can, take a photo of what you did to celebrate this special day, and share a link to it in the comments! 😊

On our open poll, many of you asked to see more statistics on the blog, so we thought we’d introduce a new series of posts all about Postcrossing and numbers. And what better way to start than by looking at some of the data from the year that just ended, right? Let’s do this!

5,425,005 postcards received

That’s right — almost 5.5 Million postcards were registered last year, which was pretty neat! We’ve just passed the 45 million milestone a few days ago, and are on track to celebrate the big 50 later this year. Woohoo!

25.7 days (average) and 17 days (median) travel time

Do you know the difference between an average (or mean) and a median? To calculate the average of a set of values, you sum all the values in your set and divide them by the total number of items in that set. This is great if your values are more or less well distributed, but outliers (both large and small) often distort the end result disproportionately.

Enter the median, which can be roughly described as the “middle” value of a data set. If you put all the travel times in a looong ordered line, 17 days would be the value in the centre of this distribution. This is a more reliable value to determine how many days most postcards travel before reaching their destination. Some will be quicker, some will be slower, but on the whole, postcards seem to travel somewhere around 17 days.

27,380,992,088 km (or or 17,013,759,698 miles) of total traveled distance

That’s… yeah. I don’t have words for it neither. We’re way beyond Pluto at this point!

19,985 km (or 12,418 miles) was the longest distance traveled by a postcard

Below is the postcard that traveled the longest distance last year. Can you guess between which countries it was exchanged?

It’s a trick question because of the content… but if you guessed New Zealand and Spain, you’d be right! Postcard NZ-155857 traveled between a pair of antipodal points: from the north tip of New Zealand to the south part of Spain.

916,800 postcards were sent from Germany 🇩🇪

Germany was the most active country last year, with almost a million postcards sent from there! Here are the other countries and territories in the top 20:

hepman sent the most postcards

Dedication and a speedy postal service helped the Germans climb to the top of the charts, where they took most of the top spots! Here are our 20 most avid postcrossers:

And that’s it for last year’s numbers! If you’re hungry for more, Postcrossing has a group of pages dedicated to statistics where you can find more data to explore.

Remember Marina’s Scarf of Friendship that we mentioned here on the blog last year? Marina (aka 167marina) from Russia had been collecting bits of yarn from all over the world to knit a super scarf that embodied the unity and friendship between different nations.

It took a whole year, but she finally finished this project late last year and took some photos with her friend Dasha, to show you the result. We thought the photos looked so lovely, we had to make another post about it! Have a look:

Isn’t that amazing? 😍 The colourful creation ended up being over 10 meters long and including all kinds of yarn, from wool to mohair, angora, cashmere, acrylic and even bamboo…

As well as postcrossers, she asked for help from all her friends and ended up with bits of yarn from 60 countries and 6 continents! Marina says:

“Each thread that I added to the scarf, was associated with a different country. I imagined the hot Bahamas, rainy London, night in Hong Kong, ancient palaces of Osaka, vivid festivals of India, the rock art of Egypt… Knitting is like traveling the planet! This scarf is a string of the Brazilian jungle, African desert, from the cold of the North Pole (Spitsbergen archipelago) and South distant Antarctica. They did the long and hard way: they were taken by snowmobile, helicopter and boat, by ship, by plane, by rail and finally by road.”

That sounds really inspiring — bravo Marina!

What about you? Planning any cool postal projects in 2018? Do share in the comments!

January is the month for planning and resolutions, so we thought we’d start off 2018 with a different kind of survey: we wanted to ask YOU (the Postcrossing community) what kind of articles you’d like to see featured here on the blog this next year.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve covered lots of different topics on the blog. From cool postal projects to giveaways, news related to Postcrossing (stamps, school activities, meetups), good causes, interviews with postcrossers or stationery makers, historical facts, the intrepid Little Mail Carriers… The list goes on and on.

But what would you like to see more of? Is there anything postal-related that you find fascinating and would like to learn more about? What are your favourite types of posts so far? What are we missing? Leave us some ideas in the comments about things you’d like to see more often in the blog, and let us know! We’ll be reviewing your feedback and hope to make the blog extra interesting for all postcrossers in 2018. :)

If you’d like to have a look at what we’ve covered in nearly 600 posts so far, check out the Blog Archives.