L is for leaves

Maple leaves, to be precise.

To celebrate 100 (oops, thanks to violeytsky for the correction) 150 years of the Canadian nation, Canada Post issued a set of 10 maple leaf-shaped stamps.

And a bonus picture of a colorful Canada Post mail box.

For more links to stamps with an L theme, head over to Sunday Stamps.

Eclipse pictorial postmarks

I sent eclipse mail for the August envelope exchange, as well as to many of my mail art friends.

Here's my envelope to Jean before posting.

And I made use of the many special postmarks available for what was, in my opinion, the best 2 minutes of 2017, and chose 3 of my favorites. They seem to have arrived at their destinations by now.

Eva blogged hers...

So did Eric...

As well as Heleen, who showed this over at IUOMA.

Thanks for the nice blog posts and comments everyone, I had fun putting this set together.

Speed limit

Erni's mail to me a while ago that featured the phrase 'Hoch 10' translating more or less as 'to the maximum' made me think of playing around with a speed limit sign that I saw.

And we had discussed thing like high 5, double high 5, low 5. So I put some 5s on the back.

My last large art sent to Erni went astray, let's hope this one makes it.

Lobster collage

I don't collage very often - not really my thing. For whatever reason, I had accumulated some random orange things and decided to make a gluepic (as my German friend Erni calls them). Including a lobster-eating, clothes-saving bib printed with an orangey lobster. I also used an artistamp from the MMSA challenge on each card.

The result, which is then chopped into 4 mailable postcard-sized pieces:

I scanned this in before sending, and created a couple of digital versions, where I changed the colors a bit and printed those out.

Inverted color: 

Bright blue background:

Chicago collage

Inspired by Pamela's New York trip, I hoarded some things from a Chicago trip, and used them to make a digital collage when I got home.

The base was a great graphic of downtown Chicago from the in-flight magazine.

I cropped the image and resized it, then printed it out onto a sheet of perforated, ready to mail postcards from USPS.

I then worked on the next layer - a scanned-in set of cards for things I didn't do when I was there. Thought about doing them, but ultimately didn't.

Since the downtown graphic was bright and colorful, I set the layer to black and white, and removed some sections. Then sent the postcard sheet through the printer a second time for the black and white layer. This gives a different result than just creating the image digitally and printing once. This is the result - 4 postcard-sized sections. 

I also created a second set, using 'things I opened in Chicago' as the black and white layer. 

I played with the colors of the downtown graphic for the second set.