I recently presented on My REAL wall at London Pecha Kucha night
Check out the whole event on at http://www.pechakucha.org/cities/london/presentations/my-real-wall-not-my-facebook-wall
I recently presented on My REAL wall at London Pecha Kucha night
Check out the whole event on at http://www.pechakucha.org/cities/london/presentations/my-real-wall-not-my-facebook-wall
Andy and Elena are BACK! We’ve spent a year in the Far East, but are back in London and with BIG news…
We’ve got a baby on the way!
Not much post in since we’ve come back as we’ve been busy getting settled back in, but here are some lovely pieces from Susan B, Mim, and the wonderfully talented Kuma from Hanoi.
Incidentally, this wall was taken in Brentford Park, under Brentford Bridge which is most famous for the filming of the series Misfits
Lets get that mail coming again now shall we…
This is our final REAL wall for a while as Elena and I are going travelling. We’ve given up our jobs, sold everything we own and have put your postcards in storage. I’ve taken the address down for contributions to my REAL wall and want to thank everyone who’s contributed over the years for all your excellent post.
So, with no fixed address, no income and a postcard and blogging habit to sustain, what’s next?
I’ve set up our new travelling and postcard blog at www.postcardsfrom.us and will be selling postcards from us from wherever we go in the world! Get yourself over there and pick up a postcard from wherever in the world we are now!
We’ve been busy packing for our trip to Asia. We’ve now got no jobs and we’re going to be leaving the house we’ve lived in for 2 years on Wednesday. All the postcards I’ve received over the years have been packed into boxes and there are just a few left in the inbox to post up before I go. My final REAL wall of your post on my wall before we travel!
After what seems like an age, Elena and I gave up our jobs today!
We plan to travel extensively, starting with a trip to Vietnam. We’re not sure how long we’ll be away, but we have one-way tickets and no intention of coming back until we’ve remembered how to relax!
Given our lack of a fixed address for this period, I have removed our address from the site as we can’t guarantee that we’ll actually receive anything. However, this isn’t the end of the road for my REAL wall or for the Hoang postcard-train! Watch this space for our new project, to be announced soon…
I’ve been pretty busy learning to code recently and have been attending informal coding meets called Techjam run by a very cool group called Freeformers. These guys teach young people how to take bits of the web and “remix” them to make cool new things and encourage young entrepreneurs to make their ideas happen on the web.
Tuesday nights are one of my reserved evenings as Techjams run on Tuesdays. Having attended for a while, I was asked to share a project that I’ve been working on and I decided to present my REAL wall, not because it’s in any way a startup, but I just wanted to talk about how working with your passions means that creating on the web is effortless.
Apparently, my “elevator pitch” went down really well and one of the guys videoed the back end of it, which I figured to upload here and share.
Posted shortly after we returned from Chinese New Year in Hong Kong – check out the the New Year Snake from DumpsterDiver in the centre.
Your postcards followed me and Elena to Suffolk where they found themselves on a gate in a field. Not just any gate though – it’s the gate of Mailartist Rebecca Guyver and in the distance you can see Patricks bothy in the field.
Some real stars of the post are represented on the wall today. Starting in the top left, we have 365er Stripygoose, who sent this watercolor to Elena a while back with a Barbados stamp, so from somewhere much warmer than here.
Working down the fence post, is a new artist Susan McAllister who seems to be using Sharpies for this piece.
Below her, a watercolor from Katerina Nikoltsou and below that a note from Heleen de Vaan. The note accompanied a book, in which Heleen was one of the featured artists, naming me and my REAL wall as one of her artistic inspirations! What an honour!
Down the central column you see art from Lisa Feltypants, who I met virtually and in the post in the original Twitter #mailart project about 2 years ago. I was a fan of her art as soon as I saw it and still am today. This plate was done on a camping trip and sent to me after I requested it on Twitter.
Below her is UK mailartist Lee Jackson who always sends very small packages containing little books.
Dumpsterdiversanonymous always makes an awesome Chinese New Years Card, and this year I was on the receiving end of a year of the snake card!
The final one in that column is from Jenn Philips, who until recently was called Jenn Angus. She married my friend Ivan Philips, with whom I went to India in 2007 so congrats to you both! She’s recently come to London where she saw lots of theatre.
The final colum features art from Gina from Taiwan. Gina got in touch via Postcrossing direct message and I sent one back to her straight away, which is really rare for me, but I loved her card and wanted to make sure that she got a reply. I know I know, I should always do that, but you know how it is.
Rebecca Resinski and I swapped lots of pics of the sky in 2008. Check them out at http://www.your-sky-our-sky.blogspot.co.uk/ and finally the last of the bunch and definitely not the least comes from Gutwrench on Etsy, who I will tell you time and again is worth every penny of your money in the post. Check out her Etsy site at http://www.etsy.com/shop/gutwrench
It’s been a while since I posted all the post that I have received on a wall anywhere, and the more I procrastinated and left it, the worse the problem seems to have become. I have a pile of postcards in need of posting on a wall and decided while at Rebecca’s place, that I would finally get around to posting them all.
So here they are, on the wall of Rebecca’s studio in Suffolk.
Thanks to everyone who has sent in, including Stripygoose, Katerina, Lancilotto and Mailart Martha.
This weekend Elena and I paid a visit to someone very special. Rebecca Guyver is an artist who first sent in a class set of mailart to our Little Big Stories mailart call for Pimlico library. Since then we’ve exchanged mailart and crossed paths on IUOMA and last year, when Rebecca finished her 365 in style, Stripygoose and I conspired to go up and meet her over a weekend.
Things came and went and fell through and finally, this weekend, Elena bought me a skydiving package, which meant I got to jump from a plane in Suffolk. Remembering that Rebecca just happened to live in Suffolk, we made our arrangements and stayed over at hers on Friday night!
The day was spent at the local boot fair and looking around town and Rebecca was the perfect host, and in the afternoon we got down to the business of mailart in the studio.
This chair was the first thing we saw when we got out the car and it lives in the studio. It’s the bed of Lyra the Guyver family dog and that shredded stuff you see in the foreground is her pillow. Was her pillow.
I had to get the mailart into this scene as it made me smile to see the cute dog surrounded by the destruction.
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