attending a big international postcrossing meet-up has been a dream which so far had been put on hold – for the great part of the last few years we were far away when these happened. not this time though, so we said, why not? we were in europe, the trip is quick and plane tickets are not that expensive, we didn’t know helsinki (but were extremely curious), and after a summer working from home, we could use a vacation. also, our dear friends nathalie and mikko live in helsinki, so it was a very nice opportunity to visit them :)

so we came to helsinki on a mission, but boy, were we in for a treat. stay tuned for an avalanche of nordic posts! :)

a cool project that tests the limits of postal workers’ patience, one strange object at a time.

check the interview with the artist on wired magazine for some more insight on the project. a small preview:

Wired.com: You have previously published books of letters, for example one where you sent letters with odd ideas to authorities, like asking a Swedish municipality if it could host a North American Indian tribe. Why are you so fascinated by letters?
Ericson: Sending things is a fun way to communicate, and I love the seriousness in letters. I mean, you would never receive a lawsuit by e-mail. There is something about letters, especially nowadays when they are getting more and more rare, and we’re communicating in other ways instead.

every now and then, we get an email from a teacher thanking us postcrossing, and telling us about their own projects that use the site. it makes me super-super happy to know that somewhere out there, some kids are excited to be receiving postcards and learning about new cultures through them.

maybe some day the world will be a better place because these kids understand a bit about other cultures, can point the countries on a map and remember one or two things about them.

more about this happy class, here.

I already had for a letter.
Understanding doesn’t work.
It is thing that it didn’t arrive.
I was expecting it.

I didn’t arrive, and I was disappointed.

sometimes, it’s all a big mystery.

like vicki says, time really flies when you’re having fun. it’s been three years since i received the first postcard ever sent through postcrossing… and here we are now, three years and over a million postcards later, still going strong :)

this has been postcrossing’s best year so far, i think. the project went through a heavy recoding to move it to the symfony framework, and a re-design at the same time. the re-coding made it easy for p. to introduce new features, which have been coming out steadily.
the over 55k-users’ community happily exchanges postcards and joins meetups around the world. oh, and on average, 2 postcards are being received each minute, somewhere in the planet. :D

this year, there was even a marriage celebrated between two people who met through postcrossing! how cool is that?

here’s hoping for another 3 years of growth, smiles and busy mailboxes!

can the queen be put to a better use?, asks graphic designer and illustrator jamie wieck. well, apparently the answer is yes – he build a set of really cute cards where the queen stamp plays an important (and original) role.
here’s what he has to say:

“Something unique about British culture is the annual sit down after a bloating Christmas lunch to watch the Queen deliver her seasonal message on TV. Well I that, and to watch somebody die/get married/get-married-then-die on Eastenders.
Inspired by this image of annual togetherness I created a Christmas card that needed the Queen herself to complete the image – after all Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the Queen.

But for the anti-royalists amongst you I figured it was only fair that the Queen should get a comeuppance of sorts…”

check out his website for lots of other good questions.

(via oh joy!)

a few months ago, at ikea, we noticed this pot lid holder. we don’t have a lot of pots and less pot lids even, but we purchased it anyway. guess what we use it for… postcards, of course!!

it’s isn’t exactly an ikea “hack”, but it fits our needs well. also, the higher racks are smaller and the lower ones are larger, which comes in quite handy for those big sized ones.

we don’t like the idea of “storing” postcards away, once received. they make us happy, so we want to look at them! :)

more pictures, on flickr (click for larger):