Pictures from/of Sticky because I’m only just back from Melbourne and exhausted.
Zine Ninja Says Hello From the Beach
Turns out that breathing in ocean air helps me to have better quality breathing overall, so Wanderer and I went to the beach! Of course, I wasn’t going to go on an adventure without Zine Ninja.
Hello Friday!
What a week!
I found a recipe to bake eight large choc chip bikkies. Perfect sized batch.
I found out my cat is Scrabble Cat! He never has to use the dictionary to look up a word.
I found out Zine Ninja loves Picnics – and not the sit-on-a-blanket kind.
I know Mondays are usually reserved for mail, but what the heck. Mail! This one came via sendsomething.net
Out & About – Zine Ninja Adventures
Zine Ninja had a grand time out and about. A friend – I think she shall now be known as Kickass – and I ran a few errands in preparation for her mum’s/my friend’s birthday tomorrow. Zine Ninja got introduced to the yummy treat known as a Picnic.
Bliss.
Hello, Sunshine!
Okay, so the first day of spring isn’t until tomorrow, but today was so gorgeous! I couldn’t resist taking some snaps out in the beautiful weather.
Asimov looks so sinister, doesn’t he?
Brin wouldn’t stay still long enough for a proper picture.
My beautiful girl, Zenna, enduring my snapping pictures.
Spring flowers!
Happy Mail! Oh, Sweet Happy Mail
Just when I thought I would have no happy mail to share for the week, These little lovelies come in last minute.
Zines, glorious zines!
Zine Ninja had a glorious swim through the creative pages of this wonderful envelope stuffed full of ziiiiiiines. Love it. These were put together by Nat from Sticky. Apparently I opted to be paid in zines this round for stocking my zines there. Never would have guessed. Haha. There are heaps of new reading materials. BUT there is one that I already have a copy of. I smell a giveaway coming up!
On another note, I received this lovely (despite my less-than-stellar photography) pocket letter from the US. It had all kinds of little goodies, including a super adorable fox stamp set.
(Want to know what pocket letters are? Click this link.)
So yes, I’m a very happy bunny with all these goodies. I’ll be sending more out into the world in the hopes more nice things visit my post box. Keep in mind that my post box is open to all friendly happy mail. My focus is on zines, but I loooooove any positive mail. 🙂
Happy Mail Monday
Hello, hello, hello!
I know the halls have been quiet around this joint for way too long, but that’s what you get with me sometimes. Welcome to all the joys of the Bipolar rollercoaster. And on to it!
I’ve always said that you have to send mail to receive it, and that has certainly worked for me this week. With the additional point of ordering things online being an option to get more mail. 😉 I sent out a few RAKs last week and am loving being back in the midst of mail.
I received two lovely bits of mail – one a letter from the States (side note: I love it when people know that they can pick up/drop off penpalling with me because I’m the same way; I don’t get worked up about prompt sending) with someone who found me (or I found?) on SendSomething.net The other bit is a zine! Yay for zine mail. This one I received as a thank you for putting up a call for submissions. That’s not a requirement by any means. Zippity Zinedra Press wanted to send it along.
Stationery! I do have a touch of an addiction to stationery. I lurve it a lot, but my wallet doesn’t often encourage this love. Thanks be to lovely people on Etsy selling their lovely items for reasonable prices.
I don’t usually do ‘haul’ pictures, but how adorable is this:
Love your postie. Haha.
Like the look of these? Then check out Sticker Paradise on Etsy.
Eventually…
Eventually, I will stop being a workaholic.
Eventually, I will be strict and only allow myself to work normal hours.
Eventually, I’ll be able to say ‘no’ and.or ‘not right now’.
Eventually, I will learn to put the deadlines I set in my calendar. That way, when I say that Dear Anonymous 3 will be sent out to contributors at the end of January, Dear Anonymous 3 will be sent out at the end of January.
Hell or high water, these are going out to contributors on Monday. After that, I will actually stick to my commitments like posting up two reviews a week and engaging with other bloggers.
Happy Mail? No. Mystery Mail? Yes!
This is one of those posts that has little to do with zines. So if you’d rather not read about my strange shenanigans, you know what to do.
Well! What a way to start the week. No happy mail, even with a Monday stop to the post office. Well, none if you don’t count a Spotlight catalogue trying to get me to spend money that I shouldn’t spend. They did, however, include a small origami project which was nearly impossible to do because they kept referring to dotted lines that didn’t exist. I did manage to make the “koala” (heavy on the quote marks). Zine Ninja wasn’t impressed.
So. Mystery mail.
I already knew I was going to be up early today thanks to the roadworks notice slipped in our street mailbox last Friday. What I didn’t expect (besides the disgusting smell of whatever they were spreading on the road) was a knock on the door from our postie. (He always talks as if I’ve been awake for hours already when I always come to the door in my PJs. Adorable.)
Having experienced mail theft, I only direct mail to our street address if I absolutely have to, so I know when something is on its way. You can imagine my surprise at being delivered the small, light package. You can imagine my greater surprise when I took this fella out:
I stared at it for a good long while, trying to jog my pre-coffee brain into some sort of recognition. Nada. I put him aside, checked the name and the address (which were mine) and then began to – half-asleep – go through my Facebook groups trying to find the person whose address was written in big, orange letters on the front.
Nada.
After I woke up a bit more, I found a third address on the box. Someone I didn’t know, but this person lived maybe twenty minutes away. Taking a close look (tiny type) at the postage sticker, I saw that it must have come from that person because their local post office was on the sticker. Light bulb. I checked my address again and saw that it was actually an old box from May of last year from VistaPrint. I’d ordered some book cover postcards for my book launch.
This person, whoever they are, had found/taken/rummaged through the recycles for the box and used it to send the bird.
Disappointing, as I was beginning to like him.
This person had also forgotten to cross out my address before sending it off, which is why it came to me instead of going to where it should have gone: Queensland. (Bit of a bloody difference!)
Wanderer took the bird back to the original sender. She was very grateful to get it back but incredibly puzzled because she’d sent it out weeks ago. It was a fairly mundane end to the mystery (the mystery of where she got the box lives on – she couldn’t remember), but I’m glad she’s happy.
Dear Anonymous 3 Sneak Peek
‘Let me explain…’
I love making Dear Anonymous. The Perfect Pocket Guinness Guide might be the first zine I ever made, but Dear Anonymous was my first zine idea.
Whenever I receive a letter to put into the zine, most times I know exactly how I want to present it. The picture of what to do with the words, what art (if any) to include, pops into my head almost instantaneously. There has been one or two times when I have stared at a letter and come up with a big zero, but I shrug those off.
So, what’s up with the grocery list?
From my attempts at sketching in the first zine to this zine, my style has changed a lot. I use a lot more typing, more elements, etc. This grocery list? Well, I got it into my head that one letter for DA3 had to be a note on the front of a refrigerator. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. Not a clue. I just cut up the bits of paper, drew on them and taped them to the page…
So, because I’ve taken so long with DA3 and because I missed the reviews last week, I figured I would break my own rules and give you a full-page sneak peek of one of the DA3 letters. This is the original, so it will look different in the finished zine. I think you can imagine what the black and white version will be like.
I’m currently working on a fake yearbook autograph page for a background for another letter. It never lets up, this crazy mind of mine.