DIY postcards and more

I love my postcards from moo.com that I wrote about in an earlier blog post. Moo also has other great products that I was very interested in. So when they offered a free shipping deal on orders made in November, I couldn't resist. :-) I got some more postcards ...

... some stickers with my own photos too, nine different ones in a booklet of 90 ...

... some of their MiniCards, which are about half the size of standard business cards and can be printed with the photo or artwork of your choice on one side, and with whatever text you want on the other. They come in packs of 100, and I uploaded 49 photos, so I got two of each design + a couple of extras. :-) On the text side (which of course you have the option of leaving blank) I put the urls for my main blog, my Youtube channel, my photostream on Flickr and a couple more places. :-) Adorable MiniCards ... !

... that come in a box for easy storage. And I bought a holder to carry them in, too. V. handy. ;-)

And finally of course I couldn't resist their Mosaic Frame, which lets you create art *cough* out of your MiniCards. It's just too cool. I had to have it. :-)

I ordered all of this on November 30th, and my order arrived in two packages, on December 15th and 16th. Pretty good in the Christmas rush. :-)

And just to make it absolutely clear, I totally love all my new stuff and am genuinely impressed with the quality this company delivers. I recommend them strongly to anyone considering purchasing this kind of product.

Postcards from Sandvika

I grew up in Bærum outside of Oslo. The closest town-like assemblage of buildings to where I lived, and where my parents still live, is Sandvika. (The words town and village don't really apply to Norwegian settlement structures. :-) It's not much of a place - without its giant mall, the biggest in Scandinavia by number of stores, there wouldn't be much left to speak of. ;-) But as it is there are a lot of people stopping by there every day ... so of course there are some postcards available. Not a lot to choose from, but still. On a recent visit I picked up a few of these.

Top left: Løkke bridge across the Sandvika river, famous for being painted by the French painter Claude Monet on his visit to Norway. Top right: an aerial shot, but not entirely up-to-date ... the mall has been expanded since then. Sheesh. Bottom: the local shoe repair shop. The owner, Ingolf Kristiansen, is something of a local celebrity, he does a lot for the community and is an all-around unusual fellow. :-)

Postcards from Pomegranate

From a discussion on the Postcrossing forum, about where to get postcards online, I picked up a tip about the publisher Pomegranate and their online store. They publish a lot of great Edward Gorey stuff, so I was already disposed to like them. ;-) It was mentioned on this thread that they do a kind of surprise package deal ... 200 randomly selected postcards, all different, for a good price. I couldn't resist ... !! :-) Not all the previous customers on the forum were equally happy, but when my cards finally arrived I thought it was a good selection. Very varied, no two cards alike, and good quality cards that I'm sure I'll find happy recipients for. :-)

However, even so, I don't think I'll be ordering from them again. Partly the price - the cards themselves weren't too expensive, but with the shipping to Norway and an extra fee charged by DHL the order as a whole ended up costing too much for my liking. It also took a really long time for the package to arrive. I placed the order on November 5th, then got an email on November ... 13th, I think, saying that my items had been sent, but the package still didn't arrive before December 8th. And the information on the box indicated that it certainly had not been sent on November 13th. >:-( So ... not too happy with that, unfortunately. Probably won't be shopping there again, and can only recommend doing so with reservations.

Anyway, I think I have enough of their type of card now to last a good long while, so it doesn't really matter, I suspect. ;-)

In addition to the surprise grab bag package of cards I also bought some postcard books. V. nice ones, all of them.

Pictures of all the cards I got are in one of my Photobucket albums, here. All clearly labeled Pomegranate. Too many to post all of them here, but here are some of the most interesting ones.

I also got these ten cards as a thank-you present for ordering.

Shopping in Oslo

A couple of weeks ago I had two Japanese tourists come to stay on a brief visit ... I took them to some of the most important tourist spots (guess which ones ;-) and of course, while we were there, I took the opportunity to do some postcard shopping. :-)

At the Nobel Peace Center ...

At the Viking Ship House ...

And at the Folk Museum.

DIY postcards, option #2

So, the first place I tried having postcards made from my own photos didn't really deliver the product I was hoping for. I won't be buying from that company again. So I needed ;-) to find somewhere else to try ... I really love the idea of cards made from my own best shots. As long as they're the quality I want. I decided to take a closer look at the company that had made the card I got from Sonja in Iceland - moo.com.

Moo looked really professional and inviting at first glance. I also really liked the fact that in both of the standard postcard packages they offer - 20 or 60 cards - you can use as many different images as you want. Ie, if you buy 60 cards, you can get 60 different ones, 60 identical ones, or anything in between. I really really like that. :-) I uploaded 12 different images, so that I'd get five cards of each photo.

You can also add a text to your cards - a greeting, an internet address, your snail mail address, whatever you want. This text will be identical on all cards though.

I placed the order on October 10th, and it took about a week and a half to arrive. The price was good ... shipping included I ended up paying between 5 and 6 crowns per card, which compared to store prices here in Norway you cannot complain about. A regular tourist postcard will normally cost 8 or 10 crowns.

But the price is actually less important than the quality. I mean, I'll pay for quality. And if the cards don't look good it doesn't matter if they're cheap. When these cards arrived, however, I was very far from disappointed. I was in fact very impressed. :-) The quality of these cards is really excellent. Wonderfully strong and bright colors, beautiful details, thick cardboard ... really the same quality as actual photos. I couldn't be happier with these cards, and I will definitely be buying from Moo again.

This time I don't have to include the actual photos in the post, because the cards themselves are the same quality. :-)

My postcard collection - the golden oldies

I used to have an enormous collection of free postcards ... and I mean really enormous ... way before Postcrossing was even invented. Postcards I didn't really do anything with, but mostly just let pile up. One time years ago I tidied up this pile and got rid of some of it ... the really useless ones. :-) You know, the kind with writing printed all over the back and no space to write anything ... and really glaring ad-type artwork, for things that I didn't even like. So a lot of it, like maybe half, got thrown out. But I kept the rest. For no reason, I didn't really use them for anything. But I kept them - thinking, I suppose, that one day they might come in handy. Yay me! :-D That day did finally come. By then of course I'd forgotten where I'd put this stash of going-on-vintage postcards, but as I was going through some desk drawers the other day looking for something else entirely, suddenly they turned up again. :-)

Not all of these are freebies - some are actually touristy cards that I must have bought at some point, and look at picture #5, I've even got lenticulars. I'd totally forgotten about those. What fun it is to find cool stuff you'd forgotten that you even had. :-D

And a few days later, again looking for something else, I found even more cards ... ! :-D More lenticulars ... ! :-)

My postcard collection

Of course since I started this new hobby I've started to amass lots of postcards too. It's too time-consuming to have to go out hunting for a postcard for each new address that I get ... and at my local mall the selection of cards available isn't that good (and also kind of expensive). So I've been going through bits and pieces that I've had lying around, and I've been out shopping too. Another thing I love shopping for, that was really what I needed. ;-) But it's giving me yet another reason to want to go traveling again ... I will so be buying lots of postcards the next time I go abroad ... !! :-D

These are (mostly) cards that I've acquired since I became a Postcrosser, or at least relatively recently.

DIY postcards, option #1

Well, maybe not entirely DIY, but you get my drift. :-)

One of the very first Postcrossing cards I received was one that the sender had had made from one of her own photos. That this was possible hadn't really occurred to me before, but of course, it's a brilliant idea. I have quite a few very good shots that I would love to do something more with than 'just' posting them on my blog. :-) So I started looking around for someplace where I could have some of these made into postcards.

I first thought I should try to find some Norwegian option, and some googling led me to Ifolor.no. I'm not sure that I'd ever heard about this company before. They advertise photo products of the highest quality. Their prices seemed pretty good, so I decided to check them out. They offered a ten-pack of cards from each photo uploaded. I used two different photos, and I ended up paying about 130 crowns (postage included) for 20 cards.

Production and shipping was quite quick, my cards were in my mailbox after one week.

The quality however ... meh. I wasn't entirely happy with the quality. The print is too grainy and the color reproduction isn't as good as I'd hoped. I've been using the cards, of course - they're certainly good enough to send, and I've gotten very positive feedback on them - but I will not be ordering from this company again.

My original photos.

The postcards. They actually look better photographed than they do in real life. :-D