Zine-a-riffic

Did you know that you, yes you, are capable of making an eight page book using any mere 8 x 10 sheet of paper?


Above is a template I've put together for how exactly you would go about it. 'Mountain folds', familiar to anyone with a childhood obsession with origami (like me), are folds where the paper, when laid flat on a table, peaks up towards you like a perfectly planar mountain range. 'Valley folds' are where the paper pokes down towards the table, creating a little trough.

Fold your paper into eight sections (half and half and half again) ignoring the direction the folds are going - any fold, once created, will happily accept either mountain or valley designations. Cut along the middle fold, NOT reaching the ends of the paper, where I have marked it above. Now fold the paper in half longways, so the cut edge is at the top of your 10 inch mountain range. Hold the paper at either end and push in, so the cut edge opens into a diamond shape and you hold a two-ply section in each hand. Push in until all four valley folds meet in the center of your paper cross. Now you can choose any of these quadrants as the front and back cover of your little pamphlet, and sandwich the rest of the pages between.

Below you will find a full sheet drawn by me on the back of a returned science quiz. This page was drawn to become a mini pamphlet, or as we krazy kids say, 'zine'. Print it out on a regular sheet of printer paper, making sure not to shrink the image and print as close to the edges of the paper as possible. Fold it as I've described above, and arrange the pages so that "FIRE!" is the front cover, and "NOW YOU WILL NEVER LEAVE ME, MY CHILD" the back. The image at the beginning of this post should end up as the centerfold.

Exactness

More from a while ago.

Cover Topography

This is the cover to the sketchbook I draw my comics in. It started with the pink tape and coffee stains, became what you see above, and is now what you see below.

Crazy Today

Circa 2006/2007? I was looking through my old sketchbooks and found some interesting pages. More to come.

Pisanka

Turning blown eggs into Pisanki eggs is an old Polish tradition. They are made through a wax-relief dying process, and generally patterned with abstract geometric patterns or natural images.


Deborah introduced me to Pisanki eggs when I was about 12, and we would spend hours in Cazadero making them. Deborah opted for the patterns, but I opted for vignettes.


This is my favorite egg I've made, which is good because I have no idea where the rest of them are. On one side is a sorcerer in a red spiraled suit, extending his arms to this little boy in a bubble on the opposite side.


The process begins with a white or brown egg. Using a small metal cone on the end of a stick, you scoop up beeswax, melt it over a candle, and draw with the narrow end of the cone. This area will remain white or brown (here, the hands and face of the sorcerer). You then dye the egg the next lightest color (here yellow) and draw again, covering what you wish to remain that color (the boy's face, the sorcerer's ruff, the border of the bubble). These steps continue through however many colors you desire, until the final color is reached, and the wax is melted off the egg, revealing the colors and polishing the egg's surface.


It is a convoluted, difficult process to hold a 3-D egg-shaped composition in your head and work from the lightest color out on a bare, 2 inch canvass. It's even more difficult not to break it afterward.

Felted Labyrinth

Back in spring semester of my freshman year, I was in a class called "Intro to Fibers". We learned all kinds of things, including felting.


This was a product of an experiment in felting yarn in between thin layers of white wool. I laid out black yarn in the shape of a labyrinth, felted over it, and later embroidered on top. The inner yarn is more visible when held to the light.


I surrounded the black yarn with backstitching, and julienne stitched across the top. I'd like to eventually finish this, perhaps as a light fixture (in some non-fire-hazard set up) or as a window hanging.

Oh My God There's A Clown Over There

I really wanted to talk to him because I wanted to tell him that I went to Circus School; for some reason I was strongly inclined to reassure him that I, unlike many people I know, am not afraid of and actually really like clowns. I felt like I was making some progress in a campaign to end clown-hate. It was probably the whiskey.

I submitted this to Xerox Candy Bar, a comics zine that SAIC puts out quarterly.

Hollow Book

I've been thinking lately, after seeing my best friend make a hollow book, that I would like to do it too. I've always been fascinated by secrets, and books, and especially secret books or bookshelves, and after we looked up how to do it it seemed too easy not to.


My next question is, what can I do with this? It's nice to have some hollow books around, but to satiate my undying appetite for monotonous repetition, I'd like to somehow make this process profitable so I therefore feel obliged to manufacture over and over again. I was thinking I could sell these at Pantheacon or my school's Holiday Art Sale. The Pantheacon question prompted me to wonder if I should make them more witchy, specifically: Wouldn't it be cool to keep Tarot cards in a hollow book? I could cut the holes in the correct dimensions and line them with some nice fabric. Or, wouldn't it be cool to have little hidden diorama/alters (in the vein of Deborah's wall alters) in your bookshelf?


Any thoughts as to if these ideas are good, interesting, salable? I really enjoy making these and want to know if it's a sensible idea.

UC Davis Survives!

Peep Show Envelope

I made this envelope in 2005. I had a crush on some boy and wanted to send him a letter, but in the process of creating the envelope I fell more it love with it and less in love with him. (A familiar story.) I was obsessed with envelopes in general, mainly creating them out of found paper and materials, and this was one of my very first sewing with paper experiments. There are so many things going on here, like suspension:

And, as a solution to not wanting the suspending thread to travel across the surface of the paper and instead remain on the unseen side, beading:


I wanted a hint of this structure to be visible with the envelope closed, so I mirrored the suspended disk in the circle cut out on the flap, and finished the edges with a blanket stitch:


You can see here as well the functional edging of the flap itself. I took black carpet thread and braided a strand somewhere between two and three feet, stitched the middle segment to the envelope with an even blanket stitch, and left substantial length on either end that may be wrapped and tied around the envelope in a number of different fastening methods.


As a final step, and probably because I don't know when to stop when I ought to, I carried the delicacy and curves of the aesthetic into the inner, penned design:


And then decided that this was one envelope there was no letter for, and didn't send it.