With Chinese New Year just around the corner, we caught up with Wuon-Gean Ho, designer of The Royal Mint’s Shēngxiào UK Lunar Coin collection, to find out more about her Year of the Monkey coin design. This is now the third coin Wuon-Gean has designed for the Lunar coin collection, so we also took the opportunity to find out more about the lino cutting technique that she uses to create her designs.
On 4 January the public vote for the 2016 UK Blog Awards opened and, for the first year ever, The Royal Mint Blog has been nominated for an award. Our blog has been entered into the Arts and Culture and Best Storyteller categories and now we need you, our readers, to help us bring home our first ever award! So, if you’ve enjoyed reading any of our blog posts in this last year, we would really appreciate your vote. Click the ‘vote now‘ image below to register your vote.
We recently announced the commemorative themes for 2016, and what a response we’ve had. We’ve been overwhelmed by the fantastic feedback we’ve received on our Facebook and Twitter; it is safe to say that 2016 is set to be a bumper year for UK coins!
To recap, in total we have revealed eight new UK coins so far. These include one 50p, one £1 coin, five £2 coins, and one £5 coin. Anniversaries for The Great Fire of London, the Battle of Hastings and William Shakespeare are all marked alongside the last ’round pound’, a £2 coin honouring the role of the Army in the First World War and a £5 coin marking Her Majesty The Queen’s 90th birthday. But, have the recently updated collector albums revealed that there are yet more to come?
If you follow The Royal Mint on social media, you will have noticed that last Sunday was ‘Stir-Up Sunday‘ – a day when families and groups get together to make their Christmas puddings. Traditionally the final ingredient to be stirred in to the mix is a silver sixpence – it is believed to bring the finder wealth and good luck for the year to come. Some families have used the same Christmas sixpence for as long as they can remember, passed down from generation to generation. As for others, this year’s Stir-Up Sunday marked the start of a new family Christmas tradition.
Shortly after the Remembrance Day ceremony here at The Royal Mint, we caught up with Glyn Davies, designer of the 2015 Remembrance Day coin, to find out more about his design. This is Glyn’s first appearance on our blog and we’ve got lots to talk about as he has also recently designed the Battle of Agincourt coin as well as the Portrait of Britain collection.
It’s been an exciting week for UK coin collectors and if you’ve not been following the announcements on Facebook or Twitter then this article should bring you up to speed! Those of you who have been collecting coins for a few years or more will know that November is normally an exciting time at The Royal Mint, as the coins of the following year are released. So, you’ll be excited to learn that on Monday the new coins for 2016 were announced! In total, eight 2016 UK coins have been revealed alongside The Sovereign for 2016.