Hey zinesters! We hope you enjoyed Rotem’s previous blog post for the free zine tutorials. During the closure, we have been discussing through online meeting about hosting virtual events and collaborative zine making.
Due to the pause of in-person events and festivals, I decided to share a throwback post about our experience at the Maker Festival Toronto 2 years ago!
Maker Fest 2018 happened on July 7th and 8th at the Toronto Reference Library. It was a great event for makers to showcase their art, design, craft and technology to the public. TZL was tabling at the second floor, we set up a table for our zine collections and promotional materials and also a zine making station where the visitors could come and learn how to make a simple folded zine.
Maker Fest is a family friendly event, so we got various visitors, range from children, teenagers, young adults to parents and seniors. Some visitors were completely new to zine culture, we took this opportunity to introduce them about TZL and answered questions such as “What is a zine?” and “How to make a zine?”. Our staffs Jordan and Rotem have made and brought their zine making guides featuring methods of bindings (hand stitch/folding/stapling) and formatting zine layouts on photoshop at our table, which were very helpful for zine beginners. We have also shown our zine collections from TZL to the visitors, including comic zines, art zines, DIY theme zines. The garlic recipes zine by Tara Bursey and cut-out moon zine were extremely popular among the visitors, they were amazed by how the garlic recipes zine was made out of actual garlic paper (some people actually sniffed the zine because they were wondering if it still has the lingering garlic smell!), and how the tiny cut-out moon zine was delicately made.
We had a lot of visitors at the zine making station, everyone was eager to learn and follow our zine folding demonstration carefully. They created contents with markers and magazine cut outs, they could also decorate the spines of their zines with colourful washi tapes. I remember some visitors created their first zines about fashion, Pokemon, traffic lights, which are so adorable and rad!
There was a zinester who was extremely excited to stumble upon us, she has never heard of the TZL until she visited our table at Maker Fest, and she was just overwhelmed with joy when she found out about our space and appreciate we are working hard to preserve and promote zine culture in Toronto. We just want to say thank you to everyone who dropped by at our table, we are so grateful for your supports, and we hope you all have fun making and reading zines!
