water

Conservation of water (2002) and a special stamp use for greeting cards (2013).  Bamboo is especially good at conserving water. Once it is established it can get all the water it needs from the ground and can help with soil erosion.

For more water, here is one from the Beautiful China series (2013) showing Xing Hua Duo Tian Agrosystem and the islands of rapeseed flowers (for canola oil). This is a unique land water use where raised cultivated fields surrounded by irrigation canals are made from the sludge. 

and, because this is apple season...

for Sunday Stamps - Asia

on the waterfront

 

I love how the Clyde Auditorium (on the banks of the River Clyde) is now known by the nickname given to it by the people of Glasgow. It opened in 1997 and the name was officially changed in 2017.  It has an auditorium that seats over 3,000 people.

In Oslo, the new Opera House (opened in 2008 and winner of Culture Building of the Year in 2009 ) was photographed by PETTER KARLSTRØM. Built on the banks of the Oslofjord, it is Norway's first purpose built opera house and is the largest cultural building constructed in Norway since 1300.

for Sunday Stamps - post war architecture

watercolours

 

Lake Pukaki, painted by New Zealand landscape artist John Gully in 1862. It's hard to see, but Mt Cook is in the distance. For LOTR fans, this was the location of Lake-town.

Up at the other end of the globe in the far north west of Scotland is Ben Arkle, painted by Prince Charles.

I'm not sure either of these paintings would make me want to visit - though, in truth, I have been to both and found them spectacular in real life.

For Sunday Stamps - art/painting

big work

New Zealand is Butterland according to an article I read on the beloved food. It seems this tiny country has a high consumption rate compared to other butter eating countries. It was a dietary staple by the mid twentieth century as this stamp from 1960 can attest (just look at the size!)

    

From an old growth forest tree (1967)             

 

to pulp and paper (1956)

For Sunday Stamps - work, industry

fast and furious

 

A Newfoundland Marten, a Blotched Tiger Salamander, a Blue Racer Snake, and a Swift Fox from 2006

The marten was once trapped for its fur.

The salamander is one of the largest in North America and likes ponds and wetlands that don't have any fish.

The blue snake, while not venomous, is aggressive and will chase you.

The swift fox now only occupies about 1/3 of its historic range.

For Sunday Stamps - endangered species

jewel

Because I don't collect creepy crawlies (and I am praying that no one posts any spiders - shudder) and I forgot I had no photos anymore (cry). So I was frantically searching through my Malaysia and Taiwan postcards thinking that's where most of the bugs stamps would be...

Then I remembered these stamps from Australia which a friend picked up for me when he was travelling. These beetles only live for between one day and two weeks. Apparently they also never lose their brilliant colours even after death, so anyone is able to see them in all their beauty in the Natural History section of Museum Victoria.

These jewel beetles were illustrated by Owen Bell. The one on the left can be found in Western Australia and the one on the right is found in Victoria and New South Wales. Each one grows to 15 - 20 mm (or in old school terms slightly less than 1") As far as I am concerned that is hug.

for Sunday Stamps - bugs and creepy crawlies

I am still working on a few 'bugs' on my new desktop, and  perhaps the most annoying one is the font size. I can increased the size on the posts as I'm typing, but once it is published it goes back to point 8. On my screen it is tiny, so tiny!

How does it look on your screens?

mysterious

 Mysterious Island

From Monaco for the 150th anniversary of Jules Verne in 1975 

To a 1961 mongoose lemur from Madagascar

For Sunday Stamps - the letter 'M'

movement

 Cycling in Munich 1972

Cross Country Skiing in Sarajevo 1984

Figure Skating in Nagano 1998

I wonder how many countries issued stamps for Tokyo 2020?

I'm going to miss watching sports that I never think about except every four years. But, we get to do it all again in 7 months for the winter games, which seems insane. But, of course it's not all over as there's still the Paralympics in  a couple of weeks. I have no stamps for those.

For Sunday Stamps - Olympics or Japan

finicky

I have missed you all! Apologies for last week.

My computer finally crashed and it took a little while getting a new one and even longer getting it up and running with transferred files.  It has been picked up today (Saturday) and I am still trying to figure it all out... the changes are at once small and great. some things have not been improved and I much prefer the old  version. but all those coders must keep on creating, I guess.

Also, I lost many of my photos in the process so have to start over with inputting my stamps and postcards.

I have chosen lacemaking as my theme this week, which is about as finicky a craft as I can think of. This example from 1976 shows the perfect posture of the artisan and the perfect mess of the bobbins she uses to create her masterpiece.

I also have this set from 1987

for Sunday Stamps - your choice

inside, outside

It would have been around 1978, when this stamp came out, that I first joined a quilting bee. It did not go well. I so admire the work these quilters can create. And the patience they have to get it done!

In 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first person to do a spacewalk. The map of earth behind him is interesting, and probably not at all as he saw it.

for Sunday Stamps - stamps from the 1900s

treasures

A souvenir sheet from 2002 featuring a map of the Ramon Crater area of the Negev Desert in Israel with stamps of an ammonite, copper mineral, and a fish fossil. I can understand the fish reaching into the selvidge, but it would be a little disappointing  to be missing the edge of the stone or the ammonite on the stamp. The blue green gemstone is an Eilat stone of several copper minerals including turquoise, malachite, azurite and is the national stone of Israel. 

for Sunday Stamps - geology

 

happy vegetables

As luck would have it, I received these happy vegetables from a Postcrosser this week.

These remind me of signs one of our grocery stores used to have in the produce section showing smiling fruits and vegetables with a "pick me, pick me".

a courgette and a potato

as well as a cabbage, cucumber and carrot

The stamps by artist Victor Chaichuk were part of                            14 vegetables issued on July 1, 2020

I will never understand the Belarusian postal rates as every card received seems to have different denominations of stamps. There is a stamp 'N' which has a face value for an international postcard, but here we have the cabbage which is 1 ruble and the carrot, cucumber, courgette are 5, 1, and 2 kopeks respectively. The potato is an  'A' which is a face value of a 20g letter within Belarus. My card had four courgettes and one of each of the others. And, not one of them was cancelled.

for Sunday Stamps - food

fathers of invention

At top left is George Klein who came up with, among many other things, the electric wheelchair and the Canadarm for the Space Shuttle.

At top right is Abraham Gesner who helped light up our world with kerosene.

At bottom left is Alexander Graham Bell best known for inventing the telephone, but he also came up with the metal detector and the hydrofoil. 

At bottom right is Joseph-Armand Bombardier who was the founder of Bombardier whose most famous invention was the snowmobile. 

for Sunday Stamps - inventions and discoveries

summer

 

Here we have a prepaid postcard version of the 2012 day lily stamp. There is also an orange one which I don't have. These day lilies bloom from June to September and I am seeing many of them in gardens as I walk around my neighbourhood.

These  have likely been shown before, but isn't an ice cream popsicle a perfect summer treat?

for Sunday Stamps - summer

cat

This 1988 stamp of the lynx doesn't show off the cute ear tufts and that is disappointing. It also makes me wonder if this isn't in fact a bobcat. His feet do look quite large and snowshoe like, but the coat is more of an orange colour with distinct marking making him look more bobcat like than the lynx which has a more grey coat with fewer distinct markings.

for Sunday Stamps - cats, big or small

dove

 For the millennium, this stamp of a peace dove is steel engraved and designed by Jorge Peral 

whose other Canadian stamps can be seen here.

 

for Sunday Stamps - monochrome

island mammals

This pine marten is only found on the island of Newfoundland, one of only 14 native mammals on the island.   They are about the size of a small housecat and weigh between 1.6lbs to 2.4lbs.

The ring tailed lemur is only found on the island of Madagascar. Unlike the marten, these lemurs are very social and live in groups of up to 30. Both are listed as endangered.

For Sunday Stamps - small animals

sultan

Sultan Ismail ibni Almarhum of the Malaysian state of Kelantan in 1937. He was born in 1880 and died of TB in 1940.

For Sunday Stamps - royalty

 

postcrossing

Razvan Popescu illustrated this Postcrossing stamp from Romania issued in 2017.

for Sunday Stamps - the letter P
 

modern

 

From 1982 architecture series

Built in the 1930s and 1940s: Falling Water (F.L. Wright), Gropius House (W. Gropius), Illinois Institute of Technology (Mies van der Rohe), 

and in 1962: Dulles Airport (Eero Saarinen)

for Sunday Stamps - buildings

labour

Farmers and workers labouring in Tunisia on this 1957 stamp for the first anniversary of independence. I'm not sure about that man wielding the mallet. The man in the circle is Habib Bourgiuba who became the first Prime Minister.

for Sunday Stamps - labourers
 

recreation

In 1957 this set of hunting, fishing, skiing and swimming stamps were issued for the four seasons of recreational sports.  I like the swimmer the best - for her smile as much as the waves. the series was called Canada - all seasons playground and designed by Laurence Hyde. It is interesting that the CANADA is in a different (though similar) typeface for each stamp.

for Sunday Stamps - sports

 

hero

Brock's Monument can be found at Queenston Heights, Ontario (near Niagara Falls) underneath which lie his remains. He was killed by a gunshot wound to his chest in battle during the War of 1812. This stamp was issued in 1969 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Sir Isaac Brock's birth in Guernsey. The imposing monument stands at 185'

for Sunday Stamps - statues, memorials

air mail

There was a time when the post travelled by balloon

In 1955 France issued a stamp to commemorate 85 years of airmail service. 

In 1870 during the Siege of Paris a balloon could fly higher than the range of enemy rifles thus allowing Gaston Tissandier, a chemist and ballooning pioneer, to deliver 175 lbs of mail. There is an English translation of his writing of the flight and efforts to deliver 30,000 letters from the people of Paris.

for Sunday Stamps - air travel

bountiful tree

A semi-postal stamp from 2020 for the Canada Post Community Foundation features a 'diverse community of animals living peacefully in a bountiful tree' (artist Isabelle Arseneault). It may not exactly be a spring theme, but now is the time when we start seeing more animals about and it does remind me of us all emerging from our winter homes to play. Of course only these ones are able to get so close as they share stories of their months of isolation from each other...

for Sunday Stamps - spring, flowers, or Easter

anne

The quintessential Canadian girl

beloved by the Japanese

This was a joint issue from 2008 for the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables

for Sunday Stamps - children

swimmers of the sea

 

A short beaked common dolphin. They are one of three species of dolphins in the Black Sea (the others being bottlenose and harbour porpoise).They are social animals often in pods of over 1,000. They are also fast swimmers (60km/hr) and known for their aerial acrobatics.

The Black Sea is an inland sea bordered by Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Turkey

for Sunday Stamps - the deep blue sea

writing

Czechoslovakian stamps come first to mind when thinking of unusual and interesting typefaces 

from the cosmonaut series with Gagarin of 1964

 to the flower series with a chrysanthemum of 1973

 

 

 

 

 

 

for Sunday Stamps - fonts and typefaces

lush

 Garajonay National Park in the Canary Islands is 40 sq. km. This stamp shows some of the large rock formations which are former volcanoes carved by erosion and a small hint that it is also a lush forest. It has been a World Heritage Site since 1986.

From Spain

 to Singapore

and the Singapore Botanic Gardens which only became a World Heritage Site in 2015 (and Singapore's first UNESCO site and the first and only tropical garden on the heritage list) but it was created in 1859. The stamps feature the gazebo at the Bandstand, Burkill Hall (the original residence of the superintendent) and Tanglin Gate (the main entrance)

For Sunday Stamps - World Heritage Sites

travels

 The St Lawrence Seaway is a system of locks, canals and channels that allows for ocean going ships to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the western end of Lake Superior, a distance of 3,750 kms. The Canadian stamp shows a compressed view of the 15 locks with the seven on the right on the St Lawrence River, the Welland Canal in the middle, and the Great Lakes and the locks at Sault Ste Marie on Lake Superior. The American stamp shows an aerial view of the route with the mouth of the St Lawrence River on the bottom right.For Sunday Stamps - your choice