Monday 30 May 2016

Never Have I Everest Zine Fair // Floss Zine // Beaver Zine


I love making zines and enjoy collecting zines from makers, illustrators, tattoo artists, printmakers etc! They are a lovely insight into how people work, more considered and refined than a sketchbook, but still almost an intimate glimpse into some-ones working practice. They are also a great format to experiment with new ideas, characters, narratives without committing to a huge project. At the start if this year, I gave myself a challenge to make a zine a month and so far, it's going well - but I haven't publicly shared them yet. I wanted to get them together at the end of the year and hopefully have an exhibition of them, in a zine library in the North of England when they are finished, presented as a little collection. It's challenging to make them with other commitments, but really fun too. I am going to, in this post, share one of them with you, which I am going to put up for sale in my etsy shop...

I kick started this bank holiday weekend at Rough Trade in Nottingham on Saturday helping out some of the NTU graphic design 1st years put on a zine fair to raise money for Child Reach International. It was called 'Never Have I Everest' and was a great day! I ran a zine making workshop, where I taught people how to use a single sheet of paper to make four different types of zines, and we collaged and drew the content. I also had a little stall and sold two zines - my Beaver zine which I made in 2012 and still have some kicking around my studio, and one of my zine-a-month 2016 zines, called 'Floss'. Below are a few pictures from the day, and some work I sold. Knitted cacti, screen-printed and hand-made cacti and succulent cushions, badger cushions and long whale pillows (which I almost sold out of! I'll be selling the remaining ones this coming Saturday (4/6) in Leeds at the first northern Crafty Fox Market on Call Lane - so pop down if you like them!) 

Pictured bottom left is an amazing Rob Ryan zine I brought at the fair to add to my collection! It's a gorgeous large screen-printed beauty. I was super happy to get my hands on it. The students raised £266 for Child Reach International and it was a great day of meeting fellow zinesters, eating cake and hanging out at Rough Trade - which is always a day well spent. 

So, as I said - the zines I sold were Floss and my Beaver zine, which I thought I'd share with you in this post. The Beaver zine was a zine I made in 2012 as a little research book on my MA about beavers. I was building a character for a picture book and on my MA I made a lot of small books and zines to visualise a variety of my research. It's a humorous account of beavers, and even though I produced it a while ago now, I still enjoy looking at it !


Floss zine is my new zine and it is a collection of illustrations about the everyday - my everyday. Both beaver and Floss are pretty lo-fi, photocopied books and are cheap to produce. Some of the zines I have been making for this challenge are not so lo-fi, they are screen-printed or digitally printed to a high quality. The aim was to explore a variety of outcomes as well as pushing myself to make something, for myself every month. Pictured below is Floss. It goes through my everyday, what I wear, use, the many cups of tea I drink daily, the commute, work, gym and home-time. 


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