My latest obsessione: zines.

Trying to find the You Letter Writing Marathon at the TINA festival, I happened across the Octapod office (little known Newcastle hangout for uni students, artists, activists etc).

I wandered in to ask if they knew where this Staple Manor place was, but never finished the sentence because I saw what you see above out of the corner of my eye. What is it? A Zine Library. 10 years of zines, collected from all over the world, vaguely sorted into sort of genres, desperately in need of someone to love it and organise the shit out of it. I put up my hand. Here's hoping :P

On Saturday morning I went to a workshop at Octapod called "Cataloguing the Zine Library" which was basically a gathering of zine writers, fans, who had converged on Newie for the This Is Not Art festival. We spent a couple of hours supposedly sorting them out, but mostly gossiping and checking out the awesomeness. I took a few photos of my favourites to share with mah blog.

The Sic Bag (above and the two below) an illustration and comic zine. The standard of work here was just incredible.

Mmmmm Butterfly hair.

This little one was my favourite. Really simple, clean illustrations with lovely little vignette poem thingys.

This one was discovered by a lovely Canberran boy, fantastic cover.

Finally, I liked the story in this one, a comic zine, but was far more taken with the occasional depection of English Architecture. Check out the building... hot.

Will post about the Zine fair yesterday much later, because I have a lovely stack of zines to go through. Amazing stuff. People just kept coming up to my stall and saying "I like your work, here take this" and handing me a little pile of the things. Other people would come up and ask me if I did swaps, which once it was explained to me how it worked, I was more than happy to oblige. Ran out of copies of my Book Zine after a bit, so I started swapping my toys for them. Woot. I heart zines, TINA and my couch.

So sweet :)

I was convo'd on Etsy last night, some lovely person from America suggested that I put the paper doll that I made of Voodoo Susan up as a PDF file.

Did so, then the lovely Angiesue bought both versions. I heart her.

Viva la technological revolution ;)

new Zine - Book Art

I've been working on a couple of Zines for the This Is Not Art sunday Zine Fair. Woah, that's a lot of capital letters.

This one, I decided, was to catalog my obsession with the genre of Book Art. Issue one, my own, every other issue to include works of art by whomever will be so kind as to let me feature them.



The cover. I warred with myself as to whether or not to include text on the title page. I even asked my friends at We Make Zines. The above is what I went with.

a skeleton man page



My favourite, the way that the leaves have melded to the page, I likes.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15770284

Why Flossy-P is frickin' awesome...

My whole life, every time I hear the postman's bike outside the front of my house I feel a thrill of excitement. Kind of like the thrill you get when you see someone you have a massive crush on but haven't kissed yet. Still, at twenty nine years of age, I love the mail.

So, this came from the lovely Flossy-P yesterday, sorry it's scanned rather than a nice photo, I blame... um... my dying phone, again, really have to do something about it. I entered a comp on Flossy-P's blog and for the first time in my blog reading career, I won, winnah!

The little cards that you can see are actually part of a lovely altruistic neighbourhood thang that she's invented. Basically you wander your neighbourhood and place cards anonymously in letter boxes to tell people that you like their gardens. Flossy-P explains the concept far better on her blog than I ever could, so please go there to read all about these gorgeous little cards:

http://flossy-p.blogspot.com/2008/09/this-is-give-away.html

I'm waiting for a weekend where my family is all in the one city so that we can wander around our neighbourhood and give them out, even though I feel like keeping the pretty little things for myself (Bad Em!) that kind of defeats the purpose of the cards.

So thankyou Flossy-P, I loved your mail so much :) Big Hugs.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go find a book worthy of the bookmark.

Paint Your Own Dragonfly

Gawd I love finding new ways to utilise the ridiculous amount of art and craft material that I have hoarded like a jealous dragon guarding it's pile of gold.

For example, I made up a few "Paint Your Own" kits to sell at the markets. They were quite popular and easy to make, so I thought I would put them on my Etsy store. After all, it is school holidays... pester power YAY!


http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15732611

Usually I don't bother, but....

When my favourite snack becomes untasty, something has to be done.

Paper Doll Kit - Voodoo Susan is a mermaid

So, the centrefold in my first volume of "Creatures and Dreams" is a paper doll version of the character Voodoo Susan. One of my lovely Sunday market friends suggested that I colour in one of these myself (did so with watercolours) and put it on my stall for sale.

After asking a few of my regulars, including Darcy, if I should try this, the answer was a definitive 'yes'. Thought I had better give it a go then.

I've been having a lovely afternoon, mucking around with the different outfits and my scanner.

Etsy link: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15730753

I HEART SUMMER!!!

Ooooh seriously, I love warm weather so much. Actually... that's not quite true, I love swimming when the weather is warm, not really the weather itself. I'm an exzema kid. Hot weather makes me itch.

Hehe thanks for sharing that Em, I'm sure you're thinking, but hey... I'm just a sharing, caring, kind of a girl :P

Yesterday afternoon the boy and I went down to Sydney for my sister's "Flying the Coop" housewarming. I took down a whole lot of ingredients for pizza, then spent the afternoon swigging champagne with Lychees in (Cas's idea, I am a total convert) and chopping up ingredients. I love cooking. Seriously. The more complicated and time consuming a recipe the more I love it. Food just seems to taste better when you spend forever messing with it :P

Anyway, so I made the ingredients, we lined them up along the bench and turned on the oven, made a couple to get them started, then we pointed hungry friends to the kitchen while we made inroads with the punch. Tasty. Ten and I left around eleven, I think, and drove all the way back up the highway to home because I had markets today. My boyfriend rocks, seriously, I'm pretty sure that I made very little sense rambling on in my warm fuzzy drunkeness, but he didn't mind at all that I sang my own lyrics over the top of his songs hehe. So yeah, we got home, after a stop off at Rich's to see his shiny new motorbike (ohhhh sooo sexy), watched somethingorother on the laptop because I was too excitable to sleep yet.

So... I woke up this morning, completely disorganised, possibly still drunk, yet still managed to pack my stuff and haul my sorry arse to the markets. Luckily Jen was there to commiserate with my sorry self and tell me stories, so I made it through.

Actually, I did more than make it through, I had an utterly awesome day. It's wierd, the heat was kind of intense, the wind was crazy, stalls were falling down, stuff was being blown off tables, but it was still, as it always is, quite lovely to be there.

Best of all though, my favourite ever customer Darcy, who is almost 4, came by to say hello with his mum. He's really shy, has only ever said hello to me before hiding behind his mum and pointing at things he likes, but today he said hello and answered questions and said goodbye.... aw man, he is the cutest kid. Reminds me of how Cas used to be around strangers.

We packed up early because the wind became ridiculous, so I came home and tried to clean the dust off things, then thought.... Eff this, why am I working when I could be swimming? So I went to the ocean baths.

The Ocean Baths ROCK. The water was cold, deliciously slitheringly cold, and there were people absolutely everywhere except in the water... only about ten people swimming. So I did a few laps, then swam to the end that looks over the sea, crossed my arms and just watched for about half an hour.

Nice.

The Orange Widget's Big Day Out

Widget the Brave: Orange Sherbet

This is the youngest of the Widget clan, Sherbet Orange is its name.

Likes hanging out on the beach, soaking up warmth from the sand and warning others to swim between the flags.

On guard at the Merewether Ocean Baths.

Mini-widget badge on my lapel watches on, while Sherbert Orange pretties itself.

To laze about in scrambled eggs.

(Please note, "scrambled eggs" is not the botanical name for this bush/plant/thing, but that's what we call it in Oz).

Behind the scenes at the shoot: Ten encouraged Orange Sherbet to work the angles.

Angels and cranes

This is the most recent of my paintings, still trying to figure out what to call it. Originally, the angel was a design for my book "Creatures and Dreams". I drew an angel and a devil and tried to portray them as I see them in my head. Devils are cute and endearing, angels are slightly creepy and alienesque. Is that a word? Is now :P

I've actually been finding it really difficult to photograph the paintings because of the mediums used. I'm a big fan of this stuff called "Interference" which adds a golden (or whatever) sheen when painted over/with acrylics. It bends the light off the paintings in all kinds of interesting ways. You can see it on these photos slightly better because I spent a day mucking around out in my courtyard, taking shots from every angle, wishing I knew how to use a proper camera.... still, camera phones are pretty good...


The pink/orange surface that the angel stands on is a combination of texture mediums (glass beads and general build-up kind of stuff). I went over the top of this with a wash, first pink, then orange, and then finished it off with iridescent shiny shiny.

The cranes in this painting are made from several types of paper. I trawl magazines for different colours, pester my friends for the foil from the cigarette packets, and hack up junk mail. Particularly fond of the dusky gold that the larger ones are made from (thankyou Benson and Hedges) wondering if it would be possible to get my hands on raw product, foil before it has been used in a packet. Probably not hehe