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A Portable Post Office
Recently, I discovered that a stall on my local market sells multitudinous out of date magazines for just £1 each. I saw that they had several about stamps and stamp collecting, so I just thought, why not? Maybe they will inspire my faux postage creations in some way. And they did! This swap is the second in a series devoted to my inner stamp geek, inspired by features in these magazines.
The Portable Post Office swap was inspired by this article , about the makeshift cancellation marks devised by Canadian postal officials in the late 19th century, due to lack of availability of official cancellations. These hand-carved marks were also sometimes known as corks, simply because they were sometimes carved from cork (either bottle corks, or sheets of cork, manufactured specifically for the purpose). The circular date stamp was always stamped on the envelope itself, as permanent evidence of postage date. But a separate 'killer' was applied to the postage stamp itself, to prevent fraudulent re-use. It is the 'killers' which were hand-carved by local post offices.
Swap description
For this swap, you will provide a Portable Post Office for your partner. This will include:
- A small decorated box (e.g. matchbox, playing card box etc) containing:
- At least 10 artistamps (made by you)
- A hand-carved cancellation mark/'killer'
- A small ink pad
Optional
- Anything else that fits in your box & would be relevant to a P.P.O.!
Optional
The idea of artistamps is that they look like real postage stamps, so things to think about are
- perforations – could be real (apparently an unthreaded sewing machine will work for this) or faux, like the stamps themselves. Or you could trim with postage stamp edge scissors.
- stickability – you could add lick'n'stick glue to the back, or (if working with paper) print/mount on self-adhesive label paper.
- origin & currency – all stamps (actually, with the exception of UK stamps) include wording for the country they are from, and the price of the stamp. You could make something up, or 'adopt' an existing fictional land for which to issue postage stamps, or you could just omit these details – it's up to you!
Swap requirements
- 1 swap partner = 1 Portable Post Office sent & 1 Portable Post Office received.
- The box containing your PPO items should be decorated in some way, however simply.
- The box should not be larger than an average 250ct matchbox but can be smaller. The minimum size is whatever size you can find that will fit all the contents listed above! Remember that dimensions of standard matchboxes vary, so don't rate your partner down for a small discrepancy.
- Stamps should be handmade by you (rather than produced for you by one of the online services (eg Zazzle or Royal Mail Smilers).
- Artistamps can be made using any art or craft medium.
- Cancellations can be carved from any material, eg lino, eraser, cork etc.
The obvious bit
You already had to have a rating of 4.9+ with no recent no-sends, 1s or 3s to join this group anyway, so the same stands for this swap. But I will still double-check before assigning partners, so if you have what you feel is an unfair comment or rating, just PM me & we can try to work it out. :-)
Resources
- Deb Duz Scrappin Large Matchbox Template - measures 1" x 2.5" x 3.5" (approx. 2.6 x 5.5 x 9cm).
- HelenJoy's (Swap Bot) Large Matchbox Template - measures approx. 1.2" x 2.8" x 4.7" (3 x 7 x 12cm - this is the size of a standard size box of UK 'cook's matches')
- Mirkwood Designs has a playing card box template, measuring 2.5" x 3.65" x .65" (approx. 6.4 x 9.5 x 1.7cm).
- Mirkwood Designs also has a masking template for hand-decorated sheets of Faux Postage as well as a Postage Stamp Envelope for storage.
- The Olathe Post has lots of info about artistamps & also sells gummed, perforated, blank stamp paper (unfortunately, overseas shipping puts this outside of my budget :-( ).
- Nick Bantock is artist & author of a series of books about Griffin & Sabine - the books are beautifully illustrated, and include 'real' letters in 'real' envelopes, embellished with 'real' faux postage & postal marks. My favourite of his, though, is Urgent, 2nd Class where he talks about his techniques and inspiration for creating his vast collection of faux ephemera. Fascinating!
- The Local Post Collectors Society gives a rundown of various people who have gone the whole hog and actually operate their own faux postal services.
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