Stamps!

I had to wait a lot longer for my stamps than anticipated, but I picked them up from the post office a couple of weekends ago, and although I haven't needed to use them yet, I'm going to start pretty soon.

I must say, I was super excited to have them in my hands and I leafed through them, caressing them lovingly, like the strange person I am. Here they are...


All the pretties lined up together :D

What you can't see is that the little envies on these stamps are shiney!

In Italy there is no 0,50 stamp, so I had to settle for 0,52 instead :/

The 1,00E stamp is by far my favourite. So simple and elegant!

I still have some other stamps left over, so the stamps you'll find on your letters may or may not include these. Next time I order stamps I'm going to have some fun mixing and matching designs ;)

Incoming/Outgoing

Oops! I made a mistake!

^ That's my favourite saying at the moment. My mistake this time was judging everything here by English standards. I assumed my stamps would be processed and posted on Monday and so here by now, but no. Only today did I get an email insinuating, but not explicitly stating, that my order has been processed. It doesn't say it's been completed or dispatched, but I'm hoping they will arrive tomorrow. Fingers crossed eh?

I got so sick of waiting and as my pile of outgoing mail grew, I went to the post office, which is a mere 82 flip-flop steps away (they are smaller than normal steps for me) and bought a bunch to cover my outgoings for today and any letters I write in the next couple of days. It totalled 16E, so I'm going to deduct that amount from when I next buy stamps. Which shouldn't be until the end of October I believe.

Anyway, a few of these outgoings were posted yesterday, but the bulk of them went into the box this afternoon. Seeing as everything is still running on 'holiday time' here, they likely won't be picked up until tomorrow morning.

Warning... there are a lot of them ;)

Outgoing

On Saturday, we stopped at a Tabaccheria to fuel my filthy habit and we found postcards of NOVARA!!! WOW!!! So we picked up a couple, the top one is going to my mum and the bottom one is to our friend Michael, who we ALWAYS send posties to, whenever we go anywhere. Seriously... anywhere ;)

This letter is for the taboo topics swap, this time the theme was 'Weight'. I like how the envie came out, I addressed it well for once, and added some stickers ontop of the vine like plant and butterfly which came printed on the envie. It's a shame I had to get rid of most of the address :\

(The following are penpal-letters, shown in the order they were written. I tried to reply in the order I received them, and went by post marks if they came in a bunch)

This was a VERY overdue first letter to Gina.


Again, an overdue letter, in reply to Rachel's letter for my Kawaii swap held last month.


I wanted to show you the back of the envie because I bought a couple of Sakura glaze gel pens while in London and I used the white one on my airmail design. I LOVE how it came out :D


A reply to the sweet Sarah who recently returned from a trip to Europe, hence the London themed stationery :)


A reply to Julie in CA who is now the proud mother of 19 hens!!!

A reply to the wonderful Candi in Australia. She always writes me long letters and I try to send long ones back :)

This is one of the lovely notecards Elle sent me on it's way to Muriah. She's expecting her 2nd child and I can't wait to find out if it's a boy or a girl!!!

And finally a bit of Fairyland to my niece Niamh in Ireland. She was too cute to send a letter to my new mailbox (I believe the words my sister used to tell her how excited I was were 'She's wetting her knickers') so she gets this pretty in return :)

There were also a couple of packages for WTA winners from swap-bot, but I won't bore you with those!

Ok, WOW, this is a long post. Don't worry it won't be much longer ;)

As for incoming I got a letter from Miss Caiti last week, a bunch today including a letter from Megan, a Postie from Esme, a postie from Candi and an AWESOME stationery swap, BUT I have no pics... maybe tomorrow??

2 Postcards
8 Letters
2 Packages

1 AU
6 EU
5 NA

A Wordy update.

I finally ordered stamps online. I ordered twice as many as I've bought enough to cover August and September's part of the 'budget'. I'm SO excited to receive them, I think they look fabulous, especially the 1Euro stamp, it's gorgeous. I'll be sure to post pics here when they arrive. EEEE!!!!

Budget you say?? Yes, well this is the sad part :( I need to start being more responsible with money, especially seeing as I don't get paid until the 1st of October, so all my money left over from my generous mother and my savings account will go on rent, food and my train pass (which will be over 600E for the year *gulp!*) so I've budgeted 25E a month on stamps.

This means that for all my lovely penpals out there, receiving letters may be a little slower than usual because I seem to have collected so many wonderful letter writing friends, I may only be able to send you a letter once a month. So please forgive me!

This may only be temporary, the budget is flexible because we have no idea what electricity or gas is going to cost us here. It's apparently way more expensive than the UK, but with both of us working full time (a new experience, haha) hoepfully we won't be using so much juice. So if I find that I've got money left over each month, you can bet it's going to one of two places: Savings or Postage costs.


I'm a little worried about post... I've been waiting for a pretty from Micaela for a while. I truly hope it isn't lost in the post :\ To be honest, with Ferragosto and the insane amount of people who take holiday in August (around 2/3rds of the country!) I should have been expecting this. Anything that is a little bulky or oversized seems to take 3 times as long to reach me. Waiting is pants!

Also, just a reminder to everyone who reads here, please don't send mail to my old Cameri address, despite pics showing up here to that address, I won't have access to the mailbox after next weekend, so it's a big fat no go :) Although, most people have been sending to the new mailbox, but there a a few stragglers (thanks to Ferragosto) and I'm worried I'm going to lose some post along the way :,( Maybe we can talk to Drago from downstairs and see if we can hijack his mailbox for a month?

I hope you all have a buon weekend and great mail days to come :D xx

Thank You (& stamps)

Firstly I wanted to say thank you for all the wonderful quotes you've all shared with me. I'm having a wonderful time reading them and think I may even dare to stain the pages of a new notebook to keep them all in... maybe. I'm getting quite excited about picking a winner ;)

On Friday I mentioned getting some stamps. Lovely, real, Italian stamps. I was so excited about this I decdied to photograph the pretties.

I know it may seem strange, but in this post office, they tend to use the printed stickers instead of stamps, but even when they do use stamps, I never get to tsee them because the staff stamp the letters and put them into a collection box for when the Pote Italiane van comes round to collect all the mail. So this is the first time I've gotten to see the stamps up close. I was delighted.

I sat on my doorstep and enjoyed every second of placing the stamps onto each letter. They definitely add the final touch to each envelope.

Now I just need to get off my bum and post them ;)

ps, next time I'm going to order them online. It caused WAY too much hassle and distressed looks from the post office staff and other customers in the queue to bother going through that again. Totally worth it for now, but I'm going to keep a low profile in the future ;)