Happy Mail from La Wendeltreppe

I love happy mail with cute postal stamps that I haven’t seen before, like these from Germany. So very cute, right?

I adore the one with The Gruffalo, because I remember vividly how I read the first book to my brother when he was a kid (written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by wonderful Axel Scheffler). I love children’s books written with rhyme!

And yes, I love happy mail…

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I actually got this little brown envelope before Christmas, but didn’t open it until now because I couldn’t concentrate on it. It was filled with smaller packages/envelopes with little collage fodder things inside. What a fun way to send things, right?

Inside each of the smaller, handmade envelopes was a new surprise.

Stickers with the text “handmade with love”, cancelled postal stamps and some hand-stamped stamp images too. The kind of little treasures that we collage artists love to play with.

Everything was packaged and made by La Wendeltreppe, or at least that is how I will always think of her. Her real name is Franca Maria, but I can’t get that into my head because I have followed La Wendeltreppe on Flickr for years and seen her images there without knowing her name.

I always like her photos of things on her desk, her collage work, journals, miniature books and snail mail adventures. Her photos are filled with brown, black or muted colors, so not really what you’d think of as “my style” – but I still love it all. I think it’s such a wonderful thing to enjoy many different styles of art, some so very different than our own “usual”. I am very drawn to it, so I have been wanting to experiment with it as well as continue with my rainbow and pink journal spreads (of course!).

Anyway, just recently we got talking for the first time, and she wanted to send me some things. And I can never say no to such offers because I’m a sucker for happy mail, collage fodder and mail gifts, even when I feel I can’t always reciprocate (in a timely manner or at all at times).

After looking it up I now know that Wendeltreppe means spiral staircase but to me it’s a person on Flickr that I’ve followed for years.

Here’s a page in one of my current mini Art Journals made from some of the things in (and on) this package:

Thank you Wendeltreppe (and before that LaWendula) dear. Grüß Gott!