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Dear Anonymous Evolution

This is the original cover for Dear Anonymous when I first started putting it together. At that point, I’d only received a few short letters, so they all fit in perfectly. However, I received one longer letter and rather have to force that person to severely edit the letter, I decided it would be better overall (especially because I want this to be a series) to move from a mini-zine (one page folded up) to a half-fold zine.

Ta-da.

It’s not as cute as the other one, but I’m really not that great of an artist so computer printing is a good thing. This is not the final product (as you may have guessed from my handwriting on it), but it’s pretty close. And it’s green! (Inspiration for the title of this blog, anyone?)

Not only does computer printing the cover (well, most of it) make it easier on me, but it will make it cheaper in the end. This first volume has all colour pages which is going to make copying expensive, but I wanted my first one to be exactly the way I wanted it. We’ll see where the next one takes me.

I am still looking for letters, so leave a comment if you’d like to take part. If you’re not comfortable with that, it’s all good. I’ll have a dedicated email for zine things as soon as I sort out whether I want to make this a .com or not.

Purple moose says, “Dot com!” But purple moose doesn’t have to pay any bills, so we’ll see.

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My First Owned Zine

If there is anything I have learned during my snooping around zine creators and communities is just that; it’s a community! So what better way to start getting to know the community than by buying some zines!

There are plenty of places to get zines for free or for trade, but I like supporting zine makers when and where I can. Etsy is a good place to find quite a variety of zines if you don’t care to join wemakezines.ning.com right now. It’s through Etsy that I bought my first zine that came in the mail. Yay!

Bum buh da dah!

The Nutella Cookbook by Anna Williams
Buy it at Etsy!

As a maker of awesome peanutellas (peanut butter and nutella bikkies), this zine was a natural buy for me. I love the result, too. The whole thing looks great and I can’t wait to try out the recipes.

I will be featuring each and every zine I receive, trade for, buy, etc here on the blog. So while I don’t have a finished zine for trading at the moment, just let me know in the comments if you are up for a future trade.

The purple moose approves!

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Starting Out

I’ve had a fascination with zines since I discovered them a few years back. It was more of a passing affection at first like smiling at the cute guy you see on the bus every morning but never bothering to take it further than that. We’ll I’ve plucked up my confidence and am asking zine making out on a date. (Workable metaphor? Maybe.)

A few years back (yeah, again), I started a project called ‘Dear Anonymous’ that was Post Secret-esque in that people sent me anonymous letters to other people. I put it up on a blog and went from there. Looking back, I didn’t give it enough time to take off. I was getting few emails – even with friends sending me their letters – and I didn’t want to use anything of mine lest certain people in my life recognize my writing. So the blog died.

But now I’m back with my passion for zines re-ignited and with a feeling that my Dear Anonymous project could be perfect for a zine. I want to make other zines, but DA has always been so close to my heart that it only seems appropriate to start with it.

I want to set up an email for receiving letters to put in the zine, so on and so forth, but we’ll see where we go from here. Leave me a comment if you’ve read this far and there is a letter – long or short – that you’d like to write to your ‘anonymous’. Just remember to make up names (if you want).