Our friend Kyoko made these Kolo Cortina Mini albums using cool Midori stickers and foreign postage stamps she found at ITOYA in Ginza, Tokyo. These mini albums were on public display at the recent Interior Lifestyle Show at the “Tokyo Big Sight,” where folks from around the world flock annually to check out what's new and cool in modern home decor and design.

I’m not a collector now, but when I was a child, my grandmother gave me many beautiful postage stamps. I think all Japanese people have collected stamps at one time or another. It’s a popular hobby.

It was fun putting together these tiny albums to show off these colorful stamps and stickers. These Kolo Cortina Mini photo albums are lovely little books. I chose the color “platinum” for the stamps album because I thought it showed off the bright Portuguese stamps best. I chose “mango” and “ocean” for the others, because these colors worked well with the Midori stickers.

I started to use clear Kolo photo corners to mount the postage stamps onto the pages as you can see in this spread, which is a nice option for a collector, but then switched to the Kolo photo mounts so that the stamps could not be stolen.

I used my Waterman fountain pen for captioning. Perhaps in Asia most people consider Montblanc the king of fountain pens, but my Waterman is my personal favorite. Consequentially, I think the color of the blue-black ink complements the stamps nicely.

To find ITOYA products sold in the USA, go here.

- Ugo