A Present from Holland

As part of the Remains of the Day class I signed up to take with Mary Ann Moss to learn how to make shabby journals (see details in my blog posting from back on January 20th http://cynfulcreationscanada.blogspot.com/2010/01/london-calling.html), we have a Flickr group to share photos of our creations and a Yahoo group for emails.

Some people in the Yahoo group have kindly offered to swap goodies with other group members and I contacted a woman named Annelies in Holland when she sent out an email to say she would be interested in exchanging ephemera.

I wasn't entirely sure what to send when I put my package together for her. My understanding was that we would send each other paper goods, vintage or new, with which we could make the pages for our journals. So I put together a collection of items - pages from old magazines and children's books, brochures from local attractions, a Toronto subway route map, used security envelopes with some of our Olympic stamps on them, in honour of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia (which start in just NINE DAYS!! So exciting!), that sort of thing.

Last night, I was delighted to receive Annelies' package for me. Talk about a celebration of riches. It kind of made me laugh to see what she had included, as some people might think some of things were better intended for the garbage or recycling bin - newspaper pages (in both Italian and Dutch), labels from canned food, security envelopes that she would have received in the mail. To me, they are a fascinating look at how people in another country live their everyday lives, the same but different from ours. What makes these commonplace items even more exciting, most of the writing on them is in a completely different language (Dutch or in the case of that newspaper page, Italian), which just makes them all that more exotic.

She sent me an atlas page of Holland, some beautiful paper napkins (see photo above of the one with the fancy cutlery on it), foam flowers and loose postage stamps (now why didn't I think of that?), various sheets of decorative paper, both small and large. One of the very best things she sent me? Chocolate -yum!!

Even better than the chocolate are the photos of windmills that she included - so Dutch, so perfect! I had sent her a picture of Canada geese that I had taken years ago but it just doesn't compare to the lovely photos she sent.

Many thanks to Annelies for her generosity in sending me this treasure trove of goodies. I can't wait to use them in my journal pages.