Tigers and African Violets

For those of you with questions about the templates for making envelopes, here's a picture of two of my smaller ones. I have literally disected envelopes to get the shapes and styles I wanted, as you can see here:


And here:


I used the first template to make the following envelope from a Wildlife Arts Magazine, circa 1990. I bought a stack of them at a garage sale last year and I'm finally putting them to good (and beautiful!) use. I'm thinking of putting some of them up on etsy - they came out much better than I expected.


I went to the post office today to drop off a letter to a new penpal (Sarah). I didn't get to go to my favourite post office and see Mary (the best and funniest 70 year old postal clerk you will ever meet) as I was in a bit of a hurry today. The envelope is made from a piece of scrapbooking paper with a pirates treasure-map theme.

My label (featuring the music-skull) is from vistaprint.ca Vistaprint has changed a lot over the years, sadly. You used to be able to get gaggles of free stuff from them, including address labels, but nowadays it doesn't seem like the deals are quite as good. But worth a try, I'd still say. I've ordered postcards, labels, Air Mail stamps, letterhead, cards and envelopes, notepads and magnets and I've been really happy with the outcome of all of them.



While at the post office, I grabbed a couple more stamps. The Mac's nearby is so completely out of it when it comes to stamp collecting, but I managed to get a couple goodies. First up is The Year of the Tiger row of stamps...

http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/personal/collecting/stamps/2010/2010_Year_of_the_Tiger.jsf

Lovely colours and embossed - great for any collector or just a snail mailer who likes things from other countries. I'm thinking about putting these up as a prize in some sort of contest. Does anyone have any ideas for a contest?



And then this lovely beauty is called a "souvenir sheet" and it features African violets. Also up as a prize for a possible contest.


And this lovely envelope (not up to win, unfortunately) is called a First Day Cover and features the African Violet yet again. I really like the colours in this one (I love pink).

If anyone wants to swap stamps or first day covers or souvenir sheets, shoot me an e-mail and i will ask Mary the Postal Clerk to put aside extra's for me in the future.