Woo! Here’s a squiz at my lovely mail this week.
I bought these two zines (and received extras!) from Melbourne zine maker Sarah McNeil. I had to grab some more of her zines after reading her Updated Report zine (review here!).
This big ol’ zine haul from the Zines A Go Go mailing list! I looove little extras like flair (hehe) and stickers, so this was an extra special package. All the way from the States! Looks like I have a big ol’ stack of zines to review.
Woo! Plenty of happy mail to be happy about. I ordered a few bits and pieces for myself that have been sitting on my wishlist for ages (I’m talking years for a couple things).
(If I’ve already talked about any of these – oops! It’s been pretty crazy this month.)
I have some awesome masking stickers, adorable cloud sticky notes as well as little rabbit sticky notes (including a ninja!) from My Paper Shoppe on Etsy. I also received a couple of envelopes from the ol’ USA. One was a card to say hello and one had four mini-zines in it! Zines A Go Go on Facebook recently got a mailing list of sorts going. It was great to receive something so soon!
In the back is a large box that looks like it should have cling wrap in it. It actually contains Tim Holtz tissue paper. I’ve been after this stuff for ages for my mixed media canvases. Yay! Last up comes The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I sampled it on Amazon and found it on Wordery. It’s a strange book in some ways, but it’s certainly a kick in the balls if you’ve been letting self-pity keep you from accomplishing [insert your creative endeavour].
I do love all the bits and bobs, but I find myself craving a fun international swap with lots of stationery, sweets and strange (just to keep with the alliteration) things. Posting to/from Australia is a beast, though, so that’ll have to be something I save up for.
I’m thinking of moving happy mail from being a Monday thing to being a Tuesday thing. It works out to be much easier most times. Anywho, no zine love this week, but I did receive an awesome pocket letter from Hawaii. So, if you’re into that, keep going. If not… Send me some zines?
😀
Just when I thought I would have no happy mail to share for the week, These little lovelies come in last minute.
Zines, glorious zines!
Zine Ninja had a glorious swim through the creative pages of this wonderful envelope stuffed full of ziiiiiiines. Love it. These were put together by Nat from Sticky. Apparently I opted to be paid in zines this round for stocking my zines there. Never would have guessed. Haha. There are heaps of new reading materials. BUT there is one that I already have a copy of. I smell a giveaway coming up!
On another note, I received this lovely (despite my less-than-stellar photography) pocket letter from the US. It had all kinds of little goodies, including a super adorable fox stamp set.
(Want to know what pocket letters are? Click this link.)
So yes, I’m a very happy bunny with all these goodies. I’ll be sending more out into the world in the hopes more nice things visit my post box. Keep in mind that my post box is open to all friendly happy mail. My focus is on zines, but I loooooove any positive mail. 🙂
I’m here! I’m still here. I promised I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet again. I’m simply disorganised. Or rather… I was.
Look at that. Organising myself like a boss. Or rather, like a kick-ass personal assistant. I’ve been a bit lost and crazy in Bipolarland over the weekend –
– but I’m back now. Really. And I got some sweet, sweet happy mail! Well, happy swap, technically, but it still rocked my socks.
I was asking about Midori Traveller’s Notebooks on a Swap-Bot group – mostly about alternatives because they are dayum expensive. Someone on the group sent me a message letting me know that she had a leather-covered journal she’d be willing to swap for something nice. Yay! I told her not to send pictures because I wanted it to be a surprise. I was definitely surprised.
While it’s fairly far from being a Midori, it still is pretty cool and has a lot of personality. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it at this point, but it’ll be something cool.
Hello, hello, hello!
I know the halls have been quiet around this joint for way too long, but that’s what you get with me sometimes. Welcome to all the joys of the Bipolar rollercoaster. And on to it!
I’ve always said that you have to send mail to receive it, and that has certainly worked for me this week. With the additional point of ordering things online being an option to get more mail. 😉 I sent out a few RAKs last week and am loving being back in the midst of mail.
I received two lovely bits of mail – one a letter from the States (side note: I love it when people know that they can pick up/drop off penpalling with me because I’m the same way; I don’t get worked up about prompt sending) with someone who found me (or I found?) on SendSomething.net The other bit is a zine! Yay for zine mail. This one I received as a thank you for putting up a call for submissions. That’s not a requirement by any means. Zippity Zinedra Press wanted to send it along.
Stationery! I do have a touch of an addiction to stationery. I lurve it a lot, but my wallet doesn’t often encourage this love. Thanks be to lovely people on Etsy selling their lovely items for reasonable prices.
I don’t usually do ‘haul’ pictures, but how adorable is this:
Love your postie. Haha.
Like the look of these? Then check out Sticker Paradise on Etsy.
Fly my pretties, fly! Dear Anonymous 3 contributor copies are flying out into the world. They have been delivered to the postal deities and will arrive at their destinations in 7-10 business days. I’m so glad they are. There’s not a lot that I hate more than missing a deadline when that deadline involves other people.
PS. I may watch Don’t Starve Together play videos while sewing zines. I don’t have a problem…
I had it in the back of my mind that this might happen eventually, but I didn’t give it too much thought because I didn’t think it would happen anytime soon. Alas, it has.
Yeah… Today I went out to the post office to send out contributor copies. Because there were so many contributors (I’m not complaining – it’s awesome!) there were not only a lot of envelopes but the zine also weighed more. As in over 50g. As in jumped up considerably for those mere grams extra.
I wouldn’t say anything, but the fact of the matter is that it was a complete fluke that I even had the money to send all this. Complete fluke. I know I should have figured out the cost going in, but I think I knew it was going to be a lot so I didn’t want to face it. (You can see why I’m rolling in the big bucks after being so financially savvy for my entire life.)
So… It’s with a very sad heart that I have to say Dear Anonymous 3 is the last zine for which I can offer physical copies for contributors.
Sigh.
I seriously did not want to have to do it. I’m sorry.
This lovely envelope of goodness comes from my friend Karley. Karley was one of the first contributors to Dear Anonymous, and she ran an awesome fiction/poetry/music zine called The Filth. She’s sent me a zine she likes that she thought I should check out along with a bunch of clippings from this and that for my various creative works.
Sweeeeet.
This is one of those posts that has little to do with zines. So if you’d rather not read about my strange shenanigans, you know what to do.
Well! What a way to start the week. No happy mail, even with a Monday stop to the post office. Well, none if you don’t count a Spotlight catalogue trying to get me to spend money that I shouldn’t spend. They did, however, include a small origami project which was nearly impossible to do because they kept referring to dotted lines that didn’t exist. I did manage to make the “koala” (heavy on the quote marks). Zine Ninja wasn’t impressed.
So. Mystery mail.
I already knew I was going to be up early today thanks to the roadworks notice slipped in our street mailbox last Friday. What I didn’t expect (besides the disgusting smell of whatever they were spreading on the road) was a knock on the door from our postie. (He always talks as if I’ve been awake for hours already when I always come to the door in my PJs. Adorable.)
Having experienced mail theft, I only direct mail to our street address if I absolutely have to, so I know when something is on its way. You can imagine my surprise at being delivered the small, light package. You can imagine my greater surprise when I took this fella out:
I stared at it for a good long while, trying to jog my pre-coffee brain into some sort of recognition. Nada. I put him aside, checked the name and the address (which were mine) and then began to – half-asleep – go through my Facebook groups trying to find the person whose address was written in big, orange letters on the front.
Nada.
After I woke up a bit more, I found a third address on the box. Someone I didn’t know, but this person lived maybe twenty minutes away. Taking a close look (tiny type) at the postage sticker, I saw that it must have come from that person because their local post office was on the sticker. Light bulb. I checked my address again and saw that it was actually an old box from May of last year from VistaPrint. I’d ordered some book cover postcards for my book launch.
This person, whoever they are, had found/taken/rummaged through the recycles for the box and used it to send the bird.
Disappointing, as I was beginning to like him.
This person had also forgotten to cross out my address before sending it off, which is why it came to me instead of going to where it should have gone: Queensland. (Bit of a bloody difference!)
Wanderer took the bird back to the original sender. She was very grateful to get it back but incredibly puzzled because she’d sent it out weeks ago. It was a fairly mundane end to the mystery (the mystery of where she got the box lives on – she couldn’t remember), but I’m glad she’s happy.
Hello, hello!
Because yesterday was Australia Day, the post office wasn’t open. I did manage to get there today and found that I had received such a cool zine package. Not package as in box but definitely package as in ‘zine with extras!’. Those extras? Really cool art!
Check that out. Isn’t it cool? The ones on the middle and left with solid navy blue backgrounds are actual postcards, and the one that is about the same size on the bottom (with the cool man in the moon) has been drawn on the back of the cover for watercolour postcards. I love being able to see the marker/pen strokes and such. The two bigger pieces at the top have drawings on the front and back, but I forgot to take pictures of the back. Oopsie. I am looking forward to digging into the zine itself. Very happy mail!
I received a couple of other things in the mail, too, but they aren’t zine-specific. I’m going to tuck those behind the more tag so you can view if you want to and not it if you don’t.
May your mailbox bring you happiness.
Happy Mail posts can go up on Tuesday… I live wildly like that. 😛
One little letter to show you today, but it’s so lovely that I couldn’t resist posting a couple pictures.
A while back, when I was still looking around for examples of zine reviews and such, I came across One Minute Zine Reviews. I found it merely days after the blog owner (DJ) had put up the post about closing up shop there.
I was a bit disappointed. Even so, I dug through his archives with pleasure and figured that I’d send him a letter of thanks for letting his archive of zine reviews remain ‘alive’ on the net.
This letter is his reply.
A close up (with better lighting) of the front of the card. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and I loved receiving it.
He also gets added to the list of people who have much better handwriting than I do. 😛
On another note, I received some lovely happy online mail as well. No pictures for those. I sent out a bunch of emails last night to anyone who had submitted to DA3 more than two months ago. I wanted to let them all know that DA3 is still happening, and that I am now shooting for the end of January (as I’ve had over half a dozen letters come in over the past couple of weeks).
I didn’t expect any emails back, so it was pretty awesome checking my email this morning.
Until the next post!
