hey y'all, here's a letter for you! we're rapidly running out of february over here lol.

remember how last time i wrote you, i was like, "maybe if i just delay getting amtrak tix for long enough, i'll be forced to drive myself to tacoma"? welp, i did!! i've driven there and back all by myself twice now, and i'm preparing to do it again tomorrow. it's difficult to articulate the mixture of feelings that bubble up when you've finally done a thing that ptsd has prevented you from doing for 7 years, but i plan to try in wanderer issue 8! which i am lowkey working on right now!

graphic design is my passion

in other news, i felt very cared for on my bday this month. thank you so much to anyone who sent me snail mail! i'm almost done replying to everyone. i ate a lot of delicious treats (and i am having a horrifyingly bad rosacea flare as a result lol), got a lot of cards and nice words, and my parents even managed to not pick a card that said "daughter" multiple times. i feel blessed!

✷ new stuff! ✷

buttons available on etsy and in my webshop! furby stickers coming to both soon.

the furby sticker came about after i found out the official furby trainer's guide says, "Furbys are similar to angels. They are not divided into male or female- they embody the best of both." and my renewed interest in furbies came about after discovering the long furby phenomenon. i love how deeply unsettling some of them are.

i made a handful of new pins, as the result of an experiment in 2.25" button production. years ago a coworker gifted me this weird hand-held 2.25" button maker and the parts to make a handful of buttons. it's very laborious compared to my usual machine. i used it once long ago, but i decided to design some stuff at that size and give it another go. the results were disastrous, so i just made them 1" designs. i've been on the fence about buying a second button maker for some time now, i just dunno what size people like that would compliment my existing pins best! feel free to weigh in.

✷ zine news ✷

as i mentioned above, i'm working on gathering my thoughts for wanderer 8. i recently got a copy of my bud jake's (@jakemayday on IG) new zine, "turn it up loud: diy for the world we have, making the world we need" which includes an excerpt from wanderer 7. i'm not sure how folks can get their hands on it, but my lil part will eventually be available to patrons in my digital zine archive. i love jake's enthusiasm and the way that he writes!

in other zine news, i made a little free zine library to put outside my house when the weather allows (and i remember to wheel the cart out there). i've been meaning to do this forever, and i hope to eventually make it a more permanent fixture (but for now i don't know how to build shit that will stand up to the pnw winter, and the little free library kits don't exactly work for my purposes)!

✷ do diy ✷

i was blown away by the response to my little campaign to get dodiy.org up to date. all of the usa has been claimed and most of those folks have reported their findings back to me already.

basically all international pages are still up for grabs, if you wanna choose a page and sign up to go through all the listings and check if they're still active. i'm slooooowly updating the site and will be getting back to folks who reported on 5+ pages to send them their rewards.

the site is looking pretty sparse, so if you know of (or run) a diy space or are someone with a diy ethos who books shows, please get in touch with me!

✷ reparations ✷

a new line item appears! it's black history month (and cruelly, the shortest month of the year) and i realized i don't think i've touched on paying personal reparations much in this newsletter. but it's a thing i do that i feel is important, especially as a fairly privileged white person who makes money selling a lot of things that say "acab" on them. for a long time i didn't have a plan to do it on a recurring basis because i felt like i was going to "do it wrong," but i realized that i was getting in my own way. activism can be tricky and it's better to do something imperfectly and get called in about it than to do nothing. so every month, i look at all my bookkeeping and i calculate 5% of my net profit. then i find somewhere to donate. sometimes it's a mutual aid request i saw on IG, sometimes it's a registered nonprofit, sometimes it's a more diy grassroots organization, but it's always BIPOC-led and focused on benefiting BIPOC folks. i donated to two orgs for january (because i also donate 100% of the profit from my BLM pins separately), soul fire farm & black feast respectively. you can find out more and see other places to donate. also, please give me a heads up if there's a rad org/person/project i should be donating to!

✷ fucking hurray ✷

crocuses are blooming in oly! i'm hoping this cold snap doesn't kill them. our potted daffodils are about to bloom as well! i love early spring flowers so much. i'm chomping at the bit for my favorite season to start. besides that, i'm grateful that my mental health has been on an even keel lately (which is surely why my body took this opportunity to freak out lol). i've been doing a lot of mending, and that feels good. i reupholstered one of our vintage kitchen chairs, repaired my nesting partner's beloved cow oven mitt, and i have a handful of other things in the queue to work on. i also splurged on a kids paper marbling kit that i'm excited to try out, and have generally been making more time to do art/crafts/take time for myself instead of feeling guilty for not working on work things (liminal spaces' free patreon posts on creative work have been a help with that!).

that's all for now! take care!

love, alyssa

~ past perzine newsletters ~