Since quarantine I’ve tried to fill some time getting back into making zines. Honestly the majority of them I made because I was having weird days where I couldn’t get out of my own head or stop reading the news— which is why the back of some say “This day is better now”. It was all I could do to sort of calm myself down. I don’t have many magazines in my apartment so I had to turn to some picture book ARCs and a catalogue from a picture book event I went to at the Society of Illustrators in NYC. Oh and some dried flowers from Germany where the petals were falling off. I thought I could frankenstein it to look like a flower again, but as I hovered the tape over the flower all he petals flew to the tape like a magnet. But now I guess it looks like the flower is blowing in the wind…
Quaranzine Vol. 1 The Shortest Day, The Longest Day. This first one came on a day where I just felt like I was consuming SO much. Every artists, writer, creator, comedian, journalist, etc, that I follow was starting to make live videos and create all these online workshops FOR FREE. I felt the need to take advantage of all of it as quickly as possible and obviously that was a recipe for disaster. So I sat down and made this instead.
Quaranzine Vol. 2 An Ode to Kartoffel. I’m learning German, my boyfriend and I had gotten very into baked potatoes, and I love Pablo Neruda’s “odes”. The zine literally consists of our bake potato recipe (not sure if you’re familiar but bake potato “recipes” are like a three step process-stab, place in oven, bake), and me rewriting ~baked, crispy, fried, mashed, roasted, stewed, gnocchi-ed~ over and over again for an entire page. I’m also into mapping lately and so I made a “map of my mind” that day where I tried to color code all the things I was thinking about and then illustrate how much brain space they were taking up (obviously on that day ‘potatoes’ took up a big portion of my mind).
Quaranzine Vol. 3 Flowers was actually from a virtual event I attended through the Wing (I’m not a member but their events are virtual now and the majority of them are free and open to non-members) where florist Sachi Rose did a DIY Floral Workshop. I have pretty bad handwriting and that is only exacerbated when I try to write quickly and take notes. This zine was my attempt at rewriting my notes into something that actually made sense. Tip: Google Flower Grid For Vase and use tape to recreate a grid on you own vase (especially if you’re using a wide mouth vase). ALSO check out videos on reflexing flowers to add dimension to your arrangement and be soothed by flower videos.
Quaranzine Vol. 4 28. I had a birthday in quarantine! I had a few things I wanted to do: eat a tuna melt, drink a Bloody Mary, and spend part of the afternoon making a zine. It was a weird but lovely day all—things considered— and this ended up being a fun project to add to it. I reached out to some friends and family to get recommendations on anything they thought I should read in the next year (books, articles, nonfiction, fiction, fantasy, etc) and here were some of the suggestions…
My boyfriend zined with me on my birthday and this is the one he made—way more abstract than any I’ve done and I really, really enjoy it.
Quaranzine Vol. 5 Writing With Rupi. Rupi Kaur has been doing writing workshops on Instagram and they’re honestly so lovely. I don’t often sit down to write—my journal is usually filled with the saddest parts of my life because the only time I feel the urge to write is when I need to get feelings out or actively think through something that’s going on—so this was new for me. Very rarely do I plan to write or set aside time to enjoy it. Anyway, my point is I think they’re really lovely workshops to do regardless of how you feel about your writing and whether or not you consider yourself a poet or an amateur bullet journal-er. I didn’t want to fill this zine with what I actually wrote during the workshop because it felt too personal, so instead I filled it with the writing prompts from Rupi’s 4th workshop.
And that’s that! If you want to make your own zine, I loved this post from author Cecilia C. Pérez. I also follow some great Instagram accounts that post zines, share live stories with information on things like dos-à-dos zine binding, and run zine events: Tech Zine Fair, ZineSoup, & BarnLib
Sarah's Shelf 
Leave a comment