Garden news, or, How is July almost over?

The summer is flying by! I have definitely been writing lots of mail, but admittedly I have been spending more time in my garden. I can only garden in the summer, so I try to live it up and maximize my outdoor gardening time during every available moment.



The weather has been truly gorgeous, and I have had many available moments to have my hands in the dirt! Since I haven't posted in a while (again), I wanted to share with you photos of where and how I've been spending most of my time.



I am a sucker for color, and I'm all about the flowers! (Alex does the veggies, and I do the flowers. Though he does a few flowers here and there, and I do no veggies. But we have a nice little team thing going.)

I've also been posting to instagram a lot lately, so if you want to have a look at my photos there, have a look at my MissiveMaven instagram pix.



I've been writing a lot more mail but not photographing much of it, but here's a nice picture I arranged earlier in the summer.

How is your summer going? Are you having a good mail summer?

Outgoing February 4: a prolific mail weekend

I am at the end of a special long weekend - I actually had 4 days off from work in a row!! This, during my busiest season, is particularly exciting. On Sunday, I went on a big mail extravaganza, and finally not only had a nice pile of outgoing mail to photograph, but actually remembered to photograph it, too. In here are personal letters, personal postcards, Postcrossing postcards - even my dreaded "tourist" postcards (but a lot of Postcrossers love 'em, so I keep 'em on hand).



I was pretty decorative with stamp choice along with stickers - and you can see that I FINALLY received my new Global Forever stamps, too. Yay.

To everyone, a good mail day!

Show and mail? Snow and mail!

Last spring some folks at the National Postal Museum started a groovy Twitter hashtag, #showandmail. The concept was similar to "show and tell:" show us what you've mailed! I love seeing photos of mail, and it was a fun way to see quickly what other folks were sending and receiving. (Especially cool for those who don't have a mail blog to be able to share an instantaneous photo.) I did a blog post about it back in April when I first got into it, and all my posts that I subsequently tweeted about are tagged with #showandmail here on my blog. It was really hot Twitter hashtag for a while, but it's sort of died off lately.

The Letter Writers Alliance did a nice post recently about Show and Mail, with the intent of reviving that hashtag and mail show-and-tell. For an explanation, the LWA Management articulated it better than I could:

Why should we do this? Well, firstly, it will get us to write more letters. Secondly, it will inspire others to write more mail. Whenever I see a show and mail I get an itch to write someone. Why not spread that feeling to others?

I've been writing mail today, and our long-awaited snowstorm has finally arrived... so I thought I'd contribute a Show and Mail in the form of Snow and Mail. (Yes, I love puns, and I'm not ashamed.)



Of course, Soda had to help.

The lovely Keep Calm and Send Postcards postcard is from MaxAndCoPost on etsy, and they have some other fine mail-related postcards in their shop. It's a great sentiment for any day, but especially a day like today when many of us on the east coast are getting quite a good bit of snow.



Soda and I intend to snuggle up and enjoy it.

Whatever your weather, if you're writing mail, pop a photo up on Twitter and use that great #showandmail hashtag, so we postal voyeurs can enjoy and be inspired. And thanks to the Letter Writers Alliance for the reminder!

Alpaca Mail, or, a Llama letter

I don't blog about kawaii stationery very often, because in truth I'm very fussy about what kawaii I like, but I think this Q-Lia Notumotu Alpaca Llama Letter set is pretty darn awesome. I mean, fuzzy wagging alpaca butts? How can one resist?



You can see this went to a friend at camp. I think a Llama letter makes some fine camp mail.

4th of July was a good mail day...

...for outgoing mail, I mean! This is all the mail from yesterday that is about to head off to the post office right now. Yay mail!

If you look closely, you'll see a glimpse of one of my NEW POSTCARD DESIGNS (can you tell I am excited?) that will debut in my etsy shop either later today or tomorrow.



Here's a closer look at all the stamps. I had fun putting those Star Wars stamps on the Star Wars postcard.

Happy summer mailing, everyone!

Red, white, and blue

I thought some good old red, white, and blue was in order for the season.

This is a letter I wrote last night on some vintage Wessel "envo-letters" stationery. It is WWII era, dates around the same time as the V-mails, but notes in packaging that it can be sent anywhere, not just to and from U.S. troops (as was the intent for V-mail.)



And yes, I do use the stickers I sell in my shop for my own correspondence, too.

To all my American readers, have a wonderful 4th of July holiday!

Pony Express postcard by Rifle Paper Co.

I just received this adorable postcard today, from Carla of 365 letters blog. Squee! Love the cute pony express postman riding through a forest. Probably not terribly historically accurate to what the pony express was really like, but hey, it's so CUTE! The postcard is made by the Rifle Paper Co. but I've just been all over their website and can't spot it anywhere on the site. Can you?

Edit: Thanks to blog reader and letter blogger Anne of Letter Love for spotting these postcards on the Paper Source website.

Good mail day - thanks, Carla!

Show and Mail

There's a fun new hashtag on Twitter, started by the National Postal Museum tweeters, called #ShowAndMail. The idea is a sort of postal "show and tell" to share one's daily mail, sent and received. I forgot to photograph my outgoing mail today before it started its journey, but here's what I received today. Typical for a Monday, it's a fun assortment.



I got a very fun assortment of foreign postage stamps, mostly from Postcrossing postcards.



I am most taken with these Dutch stamps - the meta mail-looking stamp in the upper right corner, and the one on the bottom with what looks like a leaf gnome surrounded by birds -- that one looks to be an older, maybe vintage stamp.

If you want to see some fun mail that's being sent and received, I highly recommend taking a look at the #ShowAndMail items; there are a lot of philepistolists (those obsessed with mail - thank you, Craftgasm, for coining that fine word) who tweet about mail and postal-related items regularly. Oh, and of course, I do a lot of mail tweeting, and you can follow me on Twitter, too.

What did you get in your mailbox today?

{Edit/Persnickety luddite clarification: I don't text. None of my tweeting is done on my phone. Did you know you can do Twitter all through the internet? That's what I do. I'll play with Twitter when I'm online only.}