Pocket Mail: September Issue ✏️

Hi everyone!

Happy fall! 🎑 It’s officially one of our favorite seasons (we love all of them, but fall has a special place in our hearts), and we hope everyone’s enjoying the cooler weather and some apple cider. We’ve been working on fulfillment and Knapsack 2 stuff, plus resting after SPX, and we’ve got a few updates!

We’ve received our advance copy of Knapsack 2! We’re super happy with how it turned out, the colors are super poppy and vibrant like an old kitschy cookbook. The greens are lettucey and the reds are tomatoey, as we had hoped.. it’s our wildest vegetable dreams come true. Plus the internal poster and the postcard look super great too, we love that there’s fun stuff in this volume and can’t wait to keep adding cool magazine-y extras into following entries into the series. Here’s a sneak peek:

Our books are officially on their way to us now! Hopefully they will arrive as scheduled and we’ll get backers’ books to them as expected by the end of November. After Kickstarter orders have been fulfilled, we’ll be putting Vol 2 online for sale for those who didn’t back! There’s been a lot of crazy weather in the world lately, so we’ll keep you posted in case of any delays. Crossing fingers it arrives on time…!

As always, Small Press Expo was a blast! We’ve started a yearly tradition of having a craft night on Saturdays after the show with our friends, and this year we decorated some toploaders of our guys from our Baldur’s Gate playthrough (we’ve literally been playing together remotely for over a year now and are only now reaching the end lmao). We didn’t have any good photos, so we used bad screenshots from one of the first times we played… it adds to the experience. We made some bracelets, too! :-D

For some reason we were longing for anime conventions of our youth… Steph discovered that there were masquerade shows from an anime conventions of years past uploaded in-full on youtube, which (if you don’t know) is like the main programming show at an anime convention. People dance and perform little skits cosplaying as anime characters and stuff... We miss this era. There were some wild entries in 2013. Watch some here if you dare… Anyways we were marathoning these on our hotel floor absolutely losing it with laughter. Highlight of our SPX for sure..

After SPX we visited Baltimore! We spent a few days in a dubious Airbnb BUT we survived and came out stronger than before(?)! We wanted to spend some time visiting some old haunts, we mostly went to Mom’s Organic Market, a very important pilgrimage for us (our favorite grocery store back when we lived in Hampden). We didn’t intend to but we sort of went every single day we were in Baltimore lol. Otherwise, we spent a good few days eating yummy food, visiting nostalgic parks and cozily playing video games together while it rained outside! Steph really wanted to play Fire Emblem: 3 Houses, so Sara brought their old cartridge, and we wanted to start so badly that we co-opted our friends’ switch to start LOL thank you so much Lucy and Di, our saviors…

We also visited a really cool arcade with our friends Curly & Claire, it’s called the Dugout Arcade! There’s a $12 admission fee and every game is free to play after that; the arcade has a lot of rhythm games, and even rare ones like a Rhythm Heaven cabinet! Sara was super excited to see it, they love rhythm games (and used to play Rhythm Heaven on their DS on the middle school bus with headphones in).

We didn’t get into some upcoming shows this year that we usually attend, which turned out to be a big relief for us actually! We’ve been feeling some burnout after doing back-to-back Kickstarter campaigns this year as well as keeping up with the con circuit. We want to take the time to reset and set our intentions for the coming years! We’ve been craving making some new work (both personally and as a collective), so we’re taking the rest of this year until March to focus on making new work! Feel free to send us any pitches for prints you wanna do in our email inbox if you want! We’ll see you at MOCCA (hopefully!) in 2026! In the meantime, we’re marathoning Disney Channel Halloween movies. 🎃

Steph’s Corner 🐟

September has mostly been spent moving in, slowly but surely! We’re not nearly finished, but we now have a little office I work in that used to be my partner’s childhood bedroom— we painted the walls and put up some shelving!

Unpacking has gone slowly mostly because we’ve been having a lot of fun exploring; we’ve been swimming, hiking, swimming some more, and gardening. I have a mugwort plant I’ve been tenderly caring for every week!

I also started as a glaze technician at my local pottery studio, so a few days out of the week have been spent mixing glazes and sieving them and testing new recipes. I’m really loving it, I even remembered some of the periodic table for reading chemical analyses, which feels very personally unexpected lol! My pottery teacher gave me some wood ash to make a new glaze with, so stay tuned! Maybe I’ll show you the results (in a few months, that is). I love how slow the pottery process is, and it usually takes 2-3 months before I can see a finished piece. Life has been blessedly slow after a few really fast-paced, burnout years in New York.

Sara’s Corner 🐌

My corner’s pretty simple this year, just letting the transition of the seasons sit with me as I’m in another transitional period too! Studying soil health and working hard as I have an upcoming deadline with my job. Meanwhile I’m craving the tactility of creating with my hands so I’ve been cooking, lol. I’ve been experimenting with making vegan yogurt.. I’m on my third attempt now and I think I’ve reached yogurt perfection. Making something that is fermented / pickled / otherwise a host of bacteria is so cool, I feel like I’m tending to a garden. Made a few galettes with the final summer squashes and tomatoes, warming curries as the nights are getting colder, and a really delicious few GF loafs (my favorites were a tie between cardamom + tahini + black sesame & olive oil + poached pear)

Here’s a recipe for vegan ricotta cheese:

Ingrinis:

• Tofu

• Olive Oil

• Lemon Juice

• Little bit of Lemon Zest

• 1-2 Garlic Cloves

• Oregano

• Salt & Pepp

Blend it all together and use it with pastas or as a chs substitute on pizzas (or use it like I do in a galette!!) This was taught to me by my friend this summer and I’m so excited to finally have an actually delicious homemade plant-based chs substitute….. Thanks Alex!!

Wishing you all warmth and solace! 🍂

Love,

Sara, Steph, & Pocket

Eating / Drinking:Sara: Yogurt... I've been making Golden Milk lattes for myself too. For some reason I'm craving cooling green teas, I think I'm super ready for the winter wind to make its appearance.

Steph: Lots of plate lunches, and a recent favorite is a hearty thai yellow curry dish that I can whip up quickly. I've been drinking a lot of lemonbalm tea and lavender lemonades with mint because the weather is so warm here. 

Watching / Reading / Playing / Listening to:
Sara: Finished a lot of books this month: The Botany of Desire, Siddhartha, and Liquid Jade. Currently reading Space Crone by Ursula LeGuin. Listening to this compilation album.

Steph: Fire Emblem: 3 Houses, of course. Deep diving into books on glazing; I've read John Britt's guide to high fire glazes and Mark Burleson's Ceramic Glaze Handbook cover to cover. Currently reading Pioneer Pottery by Michael Cardew and still listening to Lord Huron's new album!