Happy New Year from Ottenstein!

We are celebrating New Year with our friends in Ottenstein in Germany and I saw this nice mailbox when we were walking around in the village.
"Briefe" means letters and "zeitungen" means newspapers, so in this kind of a mailbox there is a special place for newspapers under the real mailbox part!

Regards from Bremen!

We are just visiting Bremen in Germany and I found this beautiful mailbox in the Old Town of Bremen.

Hannover Nanas

This is absolutely one of the most charming Christmas cards I have received!

In the card one of the Hannover Nanas  http://nikidesaintphalle.org/public/germany/hannover/nanas, sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle, is appearing as Santa Claus! 

Heartfelt thanks to you Lieselotte, and warm regards to Hannover (by the way, on Thursday we'll spend ten minutes in Hannover, when we'll change the train there when travelling from Bremen to Hameln to spend the New Year in Ottenstein)!

I love the angel stamp!

Letter to a Fountain Pen Lover

This is my latest letter to Ilona in http://www.missivemaven.com/. I used water color and glimmer mist on it to decorate the letter paper.

To decorate the envelope I used vintage style scrapbooking paper, which I had bought because of some pictures of fountain pens in it, which I thought Ilona as a fountain pen lover would like. :)

Merry Christmas!

These kind of Christmas cards I sent out this year.

In the picture is our dear cat Killi, some glimmer mist is sprayed on the picture and glitter glue is used to border it.

These are Finnish Christmas stamps for this year.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

For many years already I have bought a Metropolitan Museum of Art Page-A-Day Gallery Calendar, which I keep on my desk at work. I have this year started to save those calendar pages which I think could be used on cards and envelopes. This card to PostMuse is a combination of two pages, and I'm happy with the result. 

And this page again looks beautiful on the envelope.

I already have a new calendar bought for next year, so I should have material enough to be used like this. :)  

From Bruno

This letter arrived today from Bruno after travelling exactly one month from Brazil to Finland!
Thank you for a very nice letter, Bruno!

First Christmas Card This Year

This is the first Christmas card I have got this year. It's from Ivana in Czech and I think she has made it by her self: there is a Christmas tree folded of colorful paper. 

Very beautiful, thank you very much Ivana!  

Old Christmas Cards

I belong to the culture association of our small town. We got an exhibition room for our use for a couple of days, and we collected our old Christmas cards and made some quick collages of them on the walls.

These two are made by me.  

Milo

This wonderful card arrived from PostMuse.

I like cat's, so already because of that I was happy to receive this card, but also the story of the cat was so fascinating to get to know! 

Milo is the guardian of O'Hurley's General Store in West Virginia. I googled the store and found their facebook wall http://www.facebook.com/pages/Shepherdstown-WV/OHurleys-General-Store/55899122199?v=wall where also are pictures of Milo.

I would love to meet Milo!

Japanese Proverb to Japan

This card is of a drawing by the very well known Finnish children book illustrator Rudolf Koivu (1880-1946).

I felt the card was very suitable to be sent to Miwa in Japan, because the text on the card says: "No road is long with a friend - Japanese proverb".

English Hare to Hsin Yi

We were in Edinburgh, Scotland in summer, and there I found a nice paper shop Paper Tiger. I liked a lot this hare card, and because I know Hsin Yi likes hares, I bought the card for her. I hope she likes it, too!

As a postage I used one of these vegetable postages, which can be customized with stickers as funny ones. I posted about these earlier http://sfimail.blogspot.com/2010/03/vegetable-stamps.html, and then I didn't like the additional stickers at all, but I started to see them in different way, because of positive comments! :)

When I had my fifty years birthday this August, my daughter had got an idea to get a stamp made for me of one of my painting/drawing which I had made to a Swap-bot envelope http://sfimail.blogspot.com/2010/02/mail-me-decorated-envie-2.html. I like the stamp and I like to use it by adding some color to the stamping afterwards.

Riga View to Ivana

In September we visited Riga, the capital of Latvia, and I bought this card for Ivana from there.

In old town Riga, there is a Cat House with two black cats on the roof, and I sketched a part of that roof to the back side of the card.
Then I was happy when I found such a suitable postage with a picture of a cover of a book by Finnish author Mika Waltari. Also there is a black cat on the roof!