Nothing's Better than Friends

New in my Etsy shop: Say Hello to Your Friends, a Baby-sitters Club fanzine! This one has been in the works for a long time, but I just now finally got around to folding and stapling. For more information or to order, click here and visit the Welsh Rabbit shop.

From the introduction: "One of the last courses I took for my Master’s program in Library & Information Science was called Resources for Children … For one of our final assignments, we were to select a 'resource' (book, series, movie, song, etc.) that we loved as a child and reflect on the experience of revisiting it as an adult. Of course I had to write about the Baby-sitters Club. What follows is the actual text of the paper I turned in to my professor."

Minor Details

Lately I've been mailing out so many zines that the lady at the post office has started to recognize me. Mostly trades, so I have gotten a lot of interesting things in return. But the zine I want to tell you about today is one I ordered and paid for with real money—and honestly, I could never in good conscience swap something I made for a work of art like this.

Minutiae #1 and 2 are printed on nice thick paper with colored cardstock covers. They feature gorgeous illustrations and my favorite kind of handwriting, half print/half cursive. #1 is all about the first month Aijung spent in Portland, from July to August 2008. The next issue, made in summer 2009, finds her in Richmond, Virginia. I shared these with my mom the last time she was visiting, and she read them very intently. We talked about how Aijung only stayed in Portland for a little while and pointed out all the awesome drawings, including my favorite of what must be the cutest salt-n-pepper shaker in the world.

You can get these in Aijung's etsy shop. Definitely worth it.

Hello Amber

One of the best things about the best zines, I think, is learning about other people and where they're coming from. Last week I got to know Amber, through a "superpack" of five issues of her zine Culture Slut.

If Amber and I met in real life, we might not think we had that much in common just by looking at each other. She has tattoos and pink dreadlocks and likes to drink wine and have dance parties. I'm a close-to-teetotaling wallflower with boring old straight brown hair and no "ink" to speak of. Then again, we both have kind of rad glasses, and we're both feminists. In Culture Slut, Amber writes about stuff like wishing she had a tight girl gang and dealing with looking young for her age—which I can totally relate to. She also gets personal, relating how she found out about her half sister and telling the story of why she changed her name.

Culture Slut #17 is actually a split with Telegram Ma'am #17, made by Amber's twin sister Maranda. Culture Slut #18 is the latest edition, and it's the Polaroid Issue, printed in color! It's full of photos of Amber's friends and places she's seen in her journeys. You can order just that one, but I recommend the superpack for a better appreciation of the person behind the pictures.

Philly Zine Fest '08

I went to the Philly Zine Fest today and came home with Andrea's Real-Life Animal Adventures #2. Yeah, I picked it for the name, but it also has a cute design and appealingly simple concept. Andrea writes about (and draws) all the animals she's encountered, from a sparrow to a seal to a swallowtail butterfly. I like how she presents the animals that I usually think of as gross or pesky—squirrels, pigeons, rats—from a sympathetic viewpoint. Them varmints may be annoying, but I guess all creatures have their place in the world.



And for the budding librarian in me, I got one of Lollipoop Designs' library card journals. These are made from real cards like the ones I used to fill out at my elementary school library, back in the days when we had to thumb through the card catalog to look for books by title, author or subject.

Both Andrea's Real-Life Animal Adventures and the library card journal came from My My. I regret not fighting the crowd to get a good look at the PB&J table, too. That's Publishing by Brianna & Jessica, who are two very cool 12-year-old girls.

I did manage to score a vegan donut, though! The lady behind the table encouraged me to get one with icing that was made pink by cranberries, not food coloring.