PDX!!! zines!!!! fabric shopping!!!

i have totally neglected blogging about this! i came home, got super sick, and then quilt guild stuff took over my mind - now it's a month later, and i'm finally sitting down to write about my trip to portland the last weekend in august.

i went down to check out the portland zine symposium. i've been saying that i'm going to go for oh, about 10 years now, and never made it down, so this year (the 10th anniversary!) i was DETERMINED to go!

my original plans fell through, so i ended up going down by myself, and it was fabulous. i stayed with a household of awesome people, did some shopping, checked out a couple of my favourite stores, got incredibly lost in portland a multitude of times (thank god i'd bought a mapbook at powells!!), ate yummy st cupcake cupcakes, met awesome people at the zine symposium, several of whom i've been talking to online or via letters, but had never met in person, went to a couple of really interesting workshops, traded zines until i ran out, bought a million more, and then finished up my trip by spending a day with the amazing angie and her partner and son. i love them almost as much as i love angie! it was super awesome to see her and durin, and to finally meet warren!



i also finished a zine to take down with me. what was that? oh yeah, I FINISHED A ZINE! hell yeah.

despite compiling compilation zines, and having a large folder of stops and starts, i had yet to actually finish a perzine in my life, so this was very exciting!

look!!!




the covers are cardstock, with a lino print cover. i wasn't actually all that happy with the covers... i used that speedball easy carve stuff, and it was a royal pain in the ass! i get much better results just carving erasers.. but they still turned out cool.

the zine is 1/4 size (my favourite size for zines) and is 34 pages long. i added a pocket in the back to hold a mini zine, and sewed a sample of one of my favourite craft supplies onto one page, and the spine is sewn on my sewing machine.

some of the topics i wrote about...
- fear of the permanence of words
- honouring the journeys our lives take us on
- genderqueer identity
- femme identity
- chronic pain, dis/ability
- consciously choosing to live an honest life, authenticity
- a skirt reconstruction tutorial
- a favourite craft supply, along with a sample and instructions of how to use it
- hand embroidery
- a favourite recipe
- a list of things i love, my current favourite words, and least favourite words
- a mini zine written 6.5 years ago about gender, kinda like a issue #0.5 of this is where i'm at

there was SO MUCH more that i wanted to write about, if i'd just had more time. now i can't wait to make a second issue!



i drew little pictures for the tutorial, added some image transfers from an old issue of craphound, and glued a colour picture of the recipe into each one. i like the little details.

i'm alternating between being proud of it, and being really self conscious about it, but a dear friend of mine read it and insisted that i HAD to share it, and the amazing Amber (who i got to meet in person!!) from Hello Amber! wrote an awesome review of it, so i've been persuaded. it's up on my etsy, if you'd like to check out a copy in real life.

i also picked up a ton of zines in portland...



ha! i'm still working my way through them, but i finally got another zine shelf (it's the perfect size!), so i need to assemble it and then i'll be able to put them all away. most of them are still in the suitcase at the moment!

and of course, while i was in portland, i had to do some shopping... unfortunately, i completely forgot about my camera after my first stop, but oh well.

i went to bolt fabric boutique on alberta, which i adore, and bought some yummy fabrics.







and my goodies -




while i was on alberta, i wandered down to collage, and picked up some more goodies. i went downtown to powell's, of course, and checked out reading frenzy as well.

i tried to go to SCRAP, which i love, but they'd moved, and i didn't think to doublecheck their address before leaving for my trip. luckily, while i was driving to St Cupcake for my first visit of the trip, i drove right by SCRAP's new location! so i stopped, obviously. ;)

i didn't make it to Knittn' Kitten, or to Fabric Depot, but that was okay. on the way home i stopped in at the Sewer's Dream Fabric Outlet in Burlington (cotton quilt batting for $8/yd!!!), at a Target and at a Joannes. i was sad that target didn't have halloween stuff in yet - stupid back to school crap, i want skulls! i'll just have to make a quick trip down to the closest Target before halloween...

the most incredible mail day

i received a fabulous package on monday, and it made me so happy. i ordered some zines from the ephemeral mailbox museum and it was such a lovely package.

i wrote up a huge description of it the other day, and then it got eaten by my vicious computer (in reality, more a comedy of errors in which the cat sat on my keyboard at the exact moment that the draft auto-saved), and it's taken me a few days to recreate it.


when i opened the envelope (which was decorated with lots of neat images and stickers!), this is what was inside. some cards, a very cool little b&w pin, a little skully hair clip, a super sweet letter, a copy of the mini-zine go by bus and the fabulous leopard print package, tied up with string. the cards are ads for www.parcellpress.com and for ms.films; DIY guide to film & video, another project that niku does. go by bus is an art zine, all colour copied collages with bits of writing mixed in. it's super lovely, and even has a teensy picture of clara bow in it (an awesome surprise!).


i opened up the leopard print package to find more packages inside! there was a the zine "pneumatic catalog", which is lovely i'm willing to forgive the american spelling of catalogue, and two cellophane envelopes holding more goodies. pneumatic catalog is an art zine made by a group called the scrappy zine co-op in austin, tx. it's all colour copies of 25 original pieces by 10 artists and zinesters and it has a tiny photo album tucked into a library style envelope inside the front cover. the photo album is titled "my family album" and is full of images from vintage yearbooks, etc. so gorgeous.


inside one of the cellophane envelopes was the zibe "last known address", which was written for an art zine swap. it's a zine about niku's move to austin, other moves she's made, houses she's lived in, and what moving and the various houses have meant to her. it's full of typewritten thoughts, hand drawn doodles, rubber stamped images, collaged bits and found images. paperclipped (with cool stripey clip) to the back cover are a few sheets of paper with stamped images on them, and tucked inside is a cute little envelope made of an old map. inside the envelope are little art stamps that either say "last known address" or have neat little images on them. the zine also comes with a seperate min zine which niku wrote about a trip to austin that she made before she actually moved there.


the last cellophane envelope held the art zine "postal curiousities and delights", which is a gorgeous zine in which niku talks about the important of mail in her life. it's typed on an antique typewriter and is full of collages, stamped images, old postal stamps and more goodies. it's a really amazing zine, especially considering the amount of work that goes into assembling each copy! the envelope was also full of little bits of ephemera from niku's collection, some of which i used the day after receiving them, i couldn't resist!

all in all it was an incredible package, and i think my aforementioned i've-never-met-you-but-you-seem-super-cool crafty crush has developed into adoration!

(please note that bits of the descriptions came from the etsy shop!)



in other crafty mail news, i sent out a bunch of packages earlier this week, and most have been received, so now i just have to get around to posting everything i made! i've also been receiving lots of goodies! halloween postcards from the postcard swap i'm in on craftster, and halloween ATCs from the halloween atc swap i'm organizing on craftster. i've envisioned an awesome way to display all the halloween atcs, i'll be sure to post it if it actually happens!

a few atcs and a birthday present

i made these atcs a while ago, but they've finally been received, so i can post them publicly. they were for the y and z round of the alphabet atc swap on craftster.org. i kinda feel like they're not as fancy as previous cards, but they do fit the theme pretty well. i guess they're just plain in contrast to the sequins!

y is for yellow yarn

i crocheted vintage yellow wool to the right dimensions, then embroidered the Y on with yellow ribbon. i sewed a bunch of beads on by hand, then machine sewed the crocheted piece onto a card backing. i quite like it actually, even if it is yellow! i think i used every single yellow thing i had in my enormous stash for this card - i didn't realize how rarely i used yellow!

Z is for zine

i made a little ATC sized zine explaining what a zine is. this one was rather time consuming, but the hardest part was the photocopying - there's a reason why most zines are some even division of 8.5"x11"!







i made some atcs over the weekend, but most of them are secret. i can post this one, i made it for myself. very simple, i just wanted an excuse to use the rub on, but i love it.



and here's the aforementioned birthday present for my dad.

i'm pretty proud of how the stencil turned out, though i'm not too impressed with how the bleach bled onto other parts of the shirt, or the fact that i oversprayed bleach onto the neckline. oops!

i haven't decided if i'll leave it, or if i'll cut out the beer mug and sew it onto another shirt. i'm going to wait until after i give it to him, to make sure that's the right size anyway.

i think he'll really like it, he's super into brewing his own beer, and we tease him about his obsessive javex-ing of his brewing supplies, so it includes two of his favourite things! his birthday isn't till november, but we're doing a surprise birthday party since it's the big 5-0, and it's next weekend, so i'll give it to him then.


also got an amazing package in the mail today, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow, it's bedtime.

zines, mail art, fabric collage, typewriter

i made a simple quilt this weekend, for the weekend halloween swap on craftster.org, but i think i'll let my partner receive it before i post it.

lately i've been thinking a lot about making fabric/applique/collage postcards. partly because i owe a few people something fabulous in the mail, and postcards are always perfect for that, and partly because i signed up for the halloween/day of the dead postcard swap on craftster.org (because i really can't resist anything halloween- though i'm not letting myself start on them until i get caught up on other stuff!). i've done some fabric ATCs lately, and i kept thinking how fun it would be to make them bigger so that they could go through the mail...

totally coincidentally, i found this blog tonight with some pretty amazing collages. wierd coincidence, huh?

but it's totally inspirational, and now i'm even more impatient to play around with them.


in other crafty news, the studio clean up project is going s l o w l y . . . .
part of the problem is my inability to stop making stuff long enough to actually get it clean, though the sheer amount of stuff i have in there is also to blame.

i did load up the trunk of my car with two boxes and two big bags full of stuff destined for the thrift store. i'm sure there will be more.


tonight i opened up an envelope of vintage embroidery patterns and hit a jackpot - there were 5 other envelopes stuffed inside! lots of pretty flowers, vintage cars, stuff like that. it inspired me to dig out a couple of other vintage embroidery envelopes i'd stashed away, and found some lovely letters and more fleurs. then i remembered that some of my old workbasket magazines had embroidery patterns in them too, so i had to search for them. i only found a few issues, but one of them had embroidery patterns in them, and they are super duper cool - paper lanterns and a pagoda and a lotus blossom and a dragon and a bonsai tree! so gorgeous, i need to find the perfect project to use them for.


i'm working on an ATC for the alphabet ATC swap on craftster, this round is Y and Z. i made a card that was Z for zipper, but i decided that it was too common, and it occurred to me that z can also be for ZINES! so now i've decided to make an atc sized zine for the swap, and i've been typing up the little pages on my fabulous new typewriter.




(click to see the full pic)

it's probably the best $4 i've spent in my life! i ran out of ribbon today, but damned if i know where any of my back up ribbons are in my disaster of a studio, so i decided to just rewind the ribbon enough to type the last few pages of the zine. so i took the ribbon off, winded it nicely, and then realized i had no flippin clue how to put the damn thing back in.

i mean, i THOUGHT i had a clue, i thought i totally knew how to do it, but i proved myself wrong. after much cursing, many inked fingerprints everywhere, waiting for my mom to get home and try to load it (since she's actually USED typewriters for more than crafting in her life!) and then much more cursing as neither of us could figure it out, it popped neatly into place, just to prove us wrong.

speaking of zines, i love them. i finally found the box in which i packed ALL my zines (it's a big box, actually, though i managed to lose it for almost 2 years) and i'm excited to start reading them all over again. zines are actually one of the few things that i'm super organized about - they're all stored in alphabetical order by title in little japanese notebooks (like the one i decorated here), and i have a corresponding excel file that documents the title and the author so that i can search it and see what i have before ordering more (i started the excel file after i bought my third copy of the same brainscan issue!) and find all the zines i have by the same author.

i especially love crafty zines, and i think there needs to be way more of them out there. i love love love CROQ zine and i fell in love with the cuteness of a zine called scrappy a few months ago, and just realized tonight that the author (niku) has an etsy store called The Ephemeral Mailbox Museum! where she sell several other exciting looking craft zines. i have to admit that i've had a mini i've-never-met-you-but-you-seem-super-cool crush on niku for several years now - she wrote a submission for one of our femme affinity group compilation zines, and her bio made me swoon. she's a pretty amazing crafty political femme, and those are all my favourite things for people to be.

since i have yet to figure out how to get moola off my paypal account, i ordered all the zines listed on her etsy that i don't already have, and i'm very excited for them to come! i also got really enthusiastic a few days ago and bought a ton of zines from not sorry distro. (that paypal balance was really burning a hole in my pocket!)

i'm super duper excited about all the zines - maybe the time has actually come to get my ass in gear and write my own??? we'll see, won't we?