Sunday Stamps: E is for Envelope, Erwtjes and Embrace the Earth

Past Sunday's Sunday Stamps theme is/was the letter 'E'. As I was elsewhere, my contribution has a littlE dElay. But here they are:


Envelopes have been pictured on the 2008 Europa stamps (in the year two-thousand-Eight :-) )
For example on this Dutch Europa stamp:



And on the Russian Europa 2008 stamp a modern and classic version of an envelope:



Envelopes behind a modern communication medium (facilitating E-mail!) on the Europa stamp from Azerbeidjan:





Erwtjes, I think a funny Dutch word. It means 'tiny peas' (erwten is the normal plural form of the singular 'erwt'), and I was happily surprised when I saw erwtjes being honoured with a stamp from France:




The erwtjes came on a chaincard themed 'green'. And when thinking of 'green' I think of the Environment, and the need to protect it. So I also was happy to see this stamp on the card. Issued by Turkish Post, a beautiful symbolic way to show the importance of protecting the environment, to embrace the Earth.





See what other 'E' other stamp lovers had in mind on this Sunday at Violet's See it on a Postcard and follow the links in the comments.

In: from the UN and the US

It is fascinating to see how Finnbadger manages to send mail from... er, as many countries as the United Nations do count!

The stamps show three of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the successor of the eight Millenium Goals (which alas haven't been accomplished in 2015).

Inside the envelope, besides a kind message from the sender, a vintage written back of a postcard, and this wonderful mailbox collage by Craftgasm.



Thank you very much, Finnbadger!

Sunday stamps: Outer space

This Sunday's Sunday Stamps theme is 'Outer space'.

The first stamp which came into my mind is this one, received from Assel from Kazachstan.
The stamp connects our world and outer space, I mean: we watch outer space, thanks to the naked eye and to telescopes, and meanwhile one can watch us, our planet earth, from the same outer space:



Micu sent the following pretty stamps from Hungary. They are part of an eight stamps mini sheet, issued in honour of anniversaries and events in space research:



Doesn't the dog remind also you of the unfortunate pioneer space dog Laika?

In 2015 Hong Kong Post issued stamp series named 'astronomical phenomena'.
This is one stamp from this serie:



By the way, the vessel doesn't belong to the stamp, but to a pictoral postmark!


A stamp issued in Italy in honour of the exploration of Mars:




Sri Lanka has issued a stamp serie about our solar system. Thanks to Ravindra I received and subsequently scanned these:






Are you also surprised that Uranus has a ring around it? In the complete serie (see here) you can see that indeed it is Saturnus who has the clearest and largest ring.

Also the USA Post (USPS) has issued a stamp serie on the outer space. Of which I received these two:



The recent USA international 'forever' stamps show the moon and earth respectively:



In the Netherlands PostNL has issued a so-called 'postset' on Dutch astronaut André Kuipers, who worked for the European Space Agency ESA and went on a space mission twice. The 'postset' exists of a stamp sheet and three postcards. Funny enough the year of issue hasn't been written, neither on the stamp sheet, nor on the postcards front or back side. I remember André Kuipers latest (second) space mission as if it was yesterday, but when I looked it up it appeared to be already five years ago.



This stamp sheet (and my enthusiasm about this sympathetic person) I posted previously, almost three years ago, here.

The postcards I'll add here, too, as it shows beautiful views of and from outer space:








And the circle is round, I'll finish where I started by saying that our Dutch astronaut and his Russian and American colleagues returned back to earth and landed, 1st of July 2012, on a countryside in Kazachstan!

See more stamps on this theme at and via today's Sunday Stamps blog.