Well DIY Aye! has been and gone, and it was lovely.
My favourite moments include:
- Keith's embarrassed face as he announced "the dildo-making workshop is starting now in the office"
- looking around the bar and seeing three different huddles of people, heads down and intent on their craft - knitting, book-binding and patch-making - while others just chatted & plotted around them, and outside in the hallway there were couples practising self-protection, and a big ring of people banging pots and odd instruments in a collective jam
- being sad when my attempted stencil went wet too quick, but then having a flash of inspiration when the experimental dark-room techniques was announced - and returning proud and beaming with the developed images to contribute back into the manual zine pool!
The manual zine went really well with potato prints and stamps and holes made in things and glued back onto each other and some fine little drawings and a 2-year old's handprint and someone cutting up the story they wrote and we made 12 good little zines without a photocopier.
But things always take longer than expected and the more innovative techniques didn't quite get going - and I got tired and hungry after our first session.
When i re-opened the session later I realised that people who'd contributed pages in the first workshop had since moved on, and there were now more than 12 people involved which means if everyone still kept to the plan of 'make 12 copies of your page and then everyone will get a copy' then some people wouldn't get a booklet. Eek. So next time I definitely need to get people's names and contacts so I can pass on the zine if they aren't still around when it's finished. In the end it all worked out well with more than 12 made, and just a little diversity in how thick with pages they were. I have 5 left unclaimed, but I think I know a gig in Durham where two of the original contributors will be so I'll try get them along to them there.
After my darkroom stencils had dried I wasn't sure how best to bind them so I made origami envelopes to put the pages in. Even this turned into an impromptu workshop - if you want to know how to make origami envelopes just ask us! I haven't opened my own copy of the zine up again yet but when I do I'll scan a few images in here to show what we achieved - basically lots of colour & nice shapes but no plot and no photocopying!
Yay! The Liberation of Zines from Photocopiers has begun!
I should mention down-sides and omissions at DIY-Aye too.
ReplyDelete1. I was REALLY hungover after my first night out in weeks so my energy and body-sugar levels were all out. It was such a relief when Sebastian's thai curry finally appeared.
2. I didn't do the outdoor bread-making cos there was too much other stuff to do.
3. A couple of people, who I consider friends, showed their ugly, dull side in the evening. Because they (maybe just 'he') wasn't involved, did they (he) feel the need to claim territory by being lairy? Are we still at that macho lizard state of evolution? If you aren't in charge of something, do you have to treat it as a threat?