Afton, Minnesota Strawberry Festival cover
Each year, the historic town of Afton, Minnesota honors the rich heritage of strawberry crops grown in the area since the 19th century. The festival features local artists, antiques dealers, and a business expo, alongside great food, live music, and family activities.
For the 134th Strawberry Festival in 2016, the Afton Area Business Association offered a pictorial postmark of a ring of strawberries formed into a heart. For these covers, I heavily processed a picture of a heart-shaped red dish filled with beautiful strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and kiwi, arranged into a posterized pop-art style 2x2 grid, that I then rotated and slanted. Along the bottom, "Afton Strawberry Festival" is written in a playful font in which the letters appear to be strawberries, in complementary shades of red.
For postage, I paired a 2016 Quilled Paper Heart single (Scott #5036) with a 1999 33¢ self-adhesive Strawberries booklet stamp from the "Berries" series (Scott #3296). Each is cancelled with an "Afton Strawberry Festival Station" pictorial postmark from Afton, Minnesota dated June 25, 2016.
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