Amazing Mailart & Post From Around The World

It has been quite some time since I made any mailart myself so I thought it was actually about time that I did and this piece above is the result. As we know there is a lot of Fake News about now-a-days but this is in no way fake and is a genuine piece of Positively Postal mailart! When I am making pieces like this I am always on the look out for a phrase which when taken out of the magazine or publication it originally appeared in takes on a whole new meaning once teamed up with other images. I was therefore especially delighted to find “It’s easy to be a national treasure if you don’t do controversial things.” – the words of Sir David Attenborough no less. Equally thrilled to read “back in…shoulder pads” with an image of the perfect 80’s bitch, Alexis Carrington as played by Joan Collins. Add in two skulls taken from the fantastic sticker subscription I get from Pipsticks stickers (check them out here) plus some other embellishments and the whole piece slowly came together. Now I just have to decide where I am going to send it.

I have also recently started taking part in Postcrossing again after a fairly long break so first of all here are a few postcards that I have sent out into the postal ether.

This 2nd class stamp (PHQ) card featuring Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole went off to a Postcrosser in Finland and arrived in 8 days. The full set of eight stamps was issued in 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I think my favourite stamp from the set is the 81p perfectly capturing the almost mad grin of The Cheshire-Cat!

This is not the first time that said kitty has appeared on a British stamp. Let’s go back to the Greetings stamps of 1990 where s/he is smiling from cheek to cheek and you will also notice the Queen of Hearts, another key character in Alice’s adventures although on the 1990 stamp she is looking a lot more approachable than her 2015 appearance.

If I was ever going to send a card to myself then I think this is one I would choose! I don’t think you could find a card with more of a British flavour so this one lends itself perfectly to sending off abroad and sharing a possibly more idealised and nostalgic view of old Blighty. I sent this card to Bianca in Germany and it took four days to arrive which is pretty speedy. Checking out the six key British icons on this card it occured to me that all of these have been featured on various British special stamps over the years with the exception of Big Ben and then I checked again and there was a commemorative sheet marking its 150th anniversary which is where the stamp on this Medal Cover came from.

Perhaps once all the restoration work currently being carried out has been completed this most famous of clocks (and bells as that is what Big Ben really refers to)might get a set of stamps all to itself. I nearly forgot that Positively Postal had Big Ben on an artistamp earlier this year so perhaps not fully postally commemorated but nearly although The Post Office in Monaco managed a stamp!

Here are the other icons from the postcard in stamp format.

Last year I paid a visit to the Norfolk Broads and as I tend to do on such trips away I went on the search for some different postcards. This was one of the many I bought then and after a fairly long time sitting in a drawer at home I sent it off to Christiane in Germany who received it a week later. These windmills were the wind turbines of their time and a whole lot nicer to look at. I doubt very much if I will be sending a postcard featuring wind turbines to anybody in the future! These mills made me think of the set of Windmill and Watermill stamps issued earlier this year. Read more about them here.

Time now for some incoming cards, the first of which was sent in by Friederike from Germany showing a rather stern looking lady with the message “Always Smile and Think Positively!” I couldn’t help but smile and think positively when I saw this card on the doorstep. The stamp on the right intrigued me so much that I went on the hunt to find out if I could buy one and see what it had been issued for. It turns out that it forms part of what appears to be a regular series dedicated to German TV Legends. The definitive stamp on the left is one of a long running set depicting various flowers and all together they make for a lovely bunch of stamps!

Here we have a card showing a woodblock colour print of Nihonbashi and Edobashi Bridges by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige sent in by Manfred from the USA. Alongside the lower value stamps with a Tiffany Lamp (1c), US Flag 1795-1818(Ft. McHenry Flag) (6c) and Capitol Hill (10c) we have two forever stamps, one featuring John Fitzgerland Kennedy marking the centenary of his birth in 1917 while the other shows one of Disney’s most iconic villains Maleficent from the 1959 classic “Sleeping Beauty” – a most interesting combination of stamps all together!

You can’t go wrong sending me a card of a postbox as Silvia from Hamburg, Germany did and what’s even better, it’s a post box that she uses to send her cards off. When the post box looks this good it would be a sin not to use it! If anybody else has a postcard showing a postbox (new or old) that they use (or not, it doesn’t matter) then please do send it in – see address below. Stamp on the left is another of those beautiful flower definitives I mentioned above while the stamp on the right marks 200 years of the steamship, “Die Weser” which was launched on 30th December 2016 and was one of the first German steamboats.