Postcrossing Blog

Inge Löök is a Finnish illustrator and gardener who is perhaps best known for her “merry aunties” character postcards – an enduring favorite of postcrossers. She was previously featured on the blog over 10 years ago, and was kind enough to make time for an email interview with Clarisse (aka CStar9), for her series of conversations with illustrators and postcard makers. Enjoy!

Please tell us about your studio.

The place where I do my drawings is not very large; a table, a chair and the rest does not require much space. I prefer an enclosed small space where my thoughts stay together and do not wander away into other spaces. The house where I live is also small and the purpose of the house is solely to live in it. The nature outside is eternal and if I start to feel cramped I only need to open the door.

You take special care to create postcard sets of your art. Why postcards?

The old-fashioned way of sending letters and postcards is beautiful. You get to hold and touch the same paper the sender has touched. It is a gift and a thoughtfulness that requires planning in a completely different way than electronic messages.

For new ideas, what is the first step to getting an idea from your head to the page?

I do not use sketchbooks but I tend to use the back side of used photocopy sheets. Today I mainly draw postcards and if I get an idea I quickly note it down on any piece of paper with a few lines only so that I later remember how I envisage the theme for a new post card. An idea can emerge at any time, even in the middle of the night, and if so, in the morning I must swiftly note it to not forget it.

Please tell us a bit more about the origins of the Aunties characters in your art.

My closest neighbor lives around 30 meters from me in a house as small as mine. We think along the same lines and are in daily contact. She is actually one of the aunties in my illustrations, and I am the other one. In fact, we’ve played out most of what happens in my illustrations of the aunties. We’ve had wine in a tree, cakes under the table, and what we haven’t done, we wish we could do. This includes sitting high up in a clock tower with dangling legs. We are old now but know exactly how it felt when we were small and searched for messages in bottles.

Nature seems to be almost its own character in your work. We are treated to many detailed scenes that are infused with such attention and care – gardens, forests, fields, barns. How does a sense of place inform your art?

Nature is everything. I’m interested in the little and the small. I often sit with a magnifying glass and study the details of, for instance, flowers or a feather. As I see it, the big and the large then is space which offers fantasy experiences because we are unable to go there. I’ve got equipment for bird watching, and it is not only birds I look at, but the environment as a whole.

What is on the horizon for your art this year?

I’ve always had a hard time planning the future. The future has never really existed, but rather, it has merely appeared, which means that I have then had to face it as it appears.

To learn more Inge Löök and her work, visit her website or check out her Instagram.

If you’ve made it all the way here to the last bit, here’s a little bonus: Clarisse has 4 Inge Löök postcards to send to 4 postcrossers. To participate in this mini-giveaway, leave a comment below and let us know what adventures you imagine yourself on with your best friend, that would be worthy of being featured on a postcard! 😊 Check back this time next week for the winners!

Sue (aka Suegathman) has been a guest on the Postcardist podcast, and a huge fan of postcards and correspondence all her life. We thought it’d be great to invite her to chat a bit on our blog about her love of postcards and of Postcrossing, and get a glimpse into her postcard-related interests! She agreed, and we hope you’ll be fascinated by her stories below.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

In 2007, I spent lots of time on a message board (remember those?) for another interest of mine, and one of the members had the Postcrossing URL in her signature line. I’ve always been fascinated with anything to do with mail, and I clicked on the link and was intrigued. I signed up right away and sent my first five cards – which were immediately returned to me by the postman, because I put my return address in the corner and the scanning machine routed them back to me. I was mortified and almost gave up – luckily I decided to give it another try! I was on the lookout for a new hobby which wouldn’t take up a lot of time, since I had just returned to work full-time after many years raising kids. While I no longer had free time during the day to sew or read, I still wanted to do something that was fun and provided a little escape from reality. I also had a big stash of blank postcards I’d collected over the years. It seemed like a match made in heaven – which, in fact, it turned out to be.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

It’s hard to narrow it down, since I have so many great cards to choose from. I really love old propaganda and advertising cards. They say so much to me about a culture and its values. When I received this card several years ago, I put it up on a bulletin board in my kitchen and invited everyone who came over to make up a caption for it, since it’s in another alphabet. The answers were hilarious! I also immediately fell in love with this card and put it on my bulletin board at work – which is a little cheeky since I work for the government. I share the responsibility for training our young interns, and I love seeing if any of them recognize these famous faces.

How did you get started sending postcards? What is your earliest memory of them?

When my sister and I were small, my parents would often take trips during the summers while our grandparents came to our house to watch us. They always sent us postcards from their trips, usually standard viewcards showing famous attractions they visited. Our entire extended family liked to send postcards – lately I’ve enjoyed sorting through batches of old cards which my grandparents and great-grandparents exchanged with my parents.

What’s one way that postcards have changed your life for the better?

This hobby, and our wonderful Postcrossing community, have carried me through many different phases of life. When I first signed up, I was newly back to work after raising kids, had just moved to California and was trying to figure out what my adult life would look like. During the 15.5 years since then, I’ve been surrounded by postcards as my marriage ended, I took care of my ailing parents, I lost my job, went back to school and started a new career, the kids grew up and left home (and came back again), I met and married my new husband, got through Covid isolation, changed careers again… whatever I’m doing, postcards are there with me. This hobby is the one constant as my life has moved in different directions!

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

Have you been surprised by any place that you have received a postcard from or sent a postcard to?

Two cards are extra-special to me because they came from people I know in “real life, ” who I didn’t know were Postcrossers! A friend I’ve known for more than 20 years sent me this card, featuring a couple of photos of us together over the years. And the husband of my mom’s oldest friend sent me a card not too long ago. These were both big surprises (and cool cards in their own right, too). It’s also been interesting, since I’ve been participating in the project for a while, to see which countries are most active. When I first started, most of my cards seemed to go to Finland. Later, there was a full year in which I hardly sent any cards anywhere but Russia. During Covid, so many countries stopped exchanging mail with the US. Lately, the US has gotten more active, so the majority of my cards go there or to Germany.

Have you met any other members in real life?

Yes – we’re lucky to have a really great local group in San Diego which gets together twice a year for official meetups, plus many of us have become friends in “real life” and do other things together. Some of our local Postcrossers are my close friends, and they’ve introduced me to other hobbies I really enjoy. A Postcrosser even got me my first job after graduation!

Is there anything else that you are passionate about?

Other than postcards, food is my greatest obsession! One of the things that makes me happiest is cooking for a crowd of people, and I love hosting holiday meal and having friends over for dinner (and board games or cards). I volunteer with Lasagna Love, which matches up volunteer cooks with families and individuals in need of a home-cooked meal. Except for a few breaks for travel or health issues, I’ve been making and delivering a lasagna or two every week for the last 2 1/2 years, which is a lot of fun – I’ve gotten really efficient at it!

It’s our birthday today! Hurraaaaaaaay!! 🎉🎉🎉

Eighteen years… can you believe it? If Postcrossing were a baby, today would be the day in which it became an adult in most countries. As parents say, “the days are long, but the years are short” — it really feels like it!

For nearly two decades, we’ve been on an incredible journey of connection through postcards. Each postcard carries a story, a glimpse into someone’s world, and a reminder of the diversity that unites us. Together, we’ve ignited wanderlust, sparked curiosity, and learned more about the world and the unique people in it. And in doing so, we’ve built an extraordinary community, spreading joy, forging friendships, and celebrating the beauty of handwritten messages.

It makes me a little teary eyed to think of the over 72 million postcards we’ve exchanged in all these years, each a little piece of art with an heartfelt message. So many surprises and so much kindness! 💙

So thank you, to each and every one of you, for being part of this journey. Let’s grab a slice of cake and raise our pens to toast to 18 years of postcard magic!

The World Postcard Day postcard design contest is underway, and with a week to go, it’s time to meet the judges! They are the ones who are going to be looking at this year’s designs for the 2023's official postcard and have the hard task of choosing the best one!

First of all, we have Dietrich Wolf Fenner from the Berlin Museum of Communications, where last year we celebrated the launch of the German Postcrossing stamp. Dietrich is the head of the museum’s public relations department and has undoubtedly seen many stamps and postcards during office hours!

Wally Koval is the co-founder of the Accidentally Wes Anderson community, which brings together over a million adventurers, all sharing an appreciation for inspiring designs and architecture. Last year, AWA launched a popular book of postcards, spotlighting 26 special places around the globe.

Alison Hitchcock and Brian Greenley co-founded “From Me To You”, a charity that encourages people to write letters to friends and family suffering from cancer, keeping them connected at a time when they feel most disconnected.

Pauline Chrétien (aka paulinectart) was last year’s winner of the World Postcard Day design contest, so we thought it would be brilliant to invite her to take part this year, but as a judge! Pauline is an animation student in France.

And last but (hopefully) not least, me (Ana) and Paulo! Besides organizing the contest, we’ll also have a vote, and we promise to use all our postcard knowledge to vote wisely.

So there you have it — this year’s dream team is ready for voting duties when the contest closes a week from now. If you were planning on submitting a design, this is the time to do it — go! go! go! 💪

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

It’s July now, so here in the UK most university students have just finished with their exams, schools are winding down ready for the summer, and we’re all complaining it’s too hot. (Or, if it isn’t warm, we’re complaining about the rubbish summers we get in this country. It’s a national sport.) So for a lot of us, it’s time to think about how we’re going to put our feet up and relax.

For me, not too surprisingly if you’ve seen my other posts on the blog, my primary way of relaxing is to spend time reading. I have a magpie mind and I’ll try pretty much anything once, so I read all sorts: sci-fi, fantasy, mysteries, romance, science, history… My special favourites are the British Library Crime Classics. I even have a subscription with the British Library so they send me the newest book each month.

The other main thing I do during my downtime is play Final Fantasy XIV. It’s an MMORPG, so there’s a main storyline (which I’ve finished), lots of side stories (which I’ve barely begun) and various different levels of difficulty. Pictured is my character hanging out with the with one of the mail “moogles”, a little creature that delivers mail in the game. In one of the sidequests, you take on the mail moogle’s job and deliver mail, eventually earning yourself a postal worker’s hat… I’m still working on mine, though!

How about you? What do you do to relax? Are you looking forward to a quieter summer after finishing exams, like me? We’d love to hear from you via comments, but you can also use this prompt to help you write postcards this month!