Scenes from a Zine Fest

Last weekend was the annual Portland Zine Symposium. I have attended every one and tabled at all but the first. It's a fun, tiring and inspiring weekend. It's great to see zine friends from all over the country that you see every year. Some I've known for about ten years now.

Last weekend was pretty much as described. I came away feeling more inspired about zines, even though I walked away with less in quantity than before. What I did get made a strong impression. It was very hot in the room and that made it even more exhausting. I came away from the zine symposium with some great zines which I might blog about later, a renewed love of zines and zinesters, a summer cold, a completely wrecked house and a new zine of my own.

My new zine is Paper Crush #4 and it's about collecting vintage postcards and photographs.

100 years from now there will be much less paper correspondence for people to see and learn from. Through vintage postcards and photographs you get to read words from people's every day lives from over 100 years ago. You can see images of places that may or may not still be standing.

Each Paper Crush #4 zine comes with a free vintage postcard! You can find the new zine on my Etsy shop.

If you wonder what a zine symposium is like, this video is almost as good as being there. It's kind of long, but gives you the idea. They seem to have captured almost every table there but mine, but that's okay. I got some pictures to share.

One of the things I really love about the zine symposium is the creative things that people do at their table. Sometimes it's decorations, sometimes it's free stuff they offer. This video captures a good amount of that.

This year I made little postcards and gave them away so that people could leave notes on each other's table. it was pretty fun. I should have made more.

Here are some pics that I captured from my table.

This is before the doors opened