Yule travel altar – visiting a witch town during Winter Solstice

Last week I visited Vielsalm, a small town known for witchy folklore. I’ve been there before and enjoyed the quietness, beauty of nature, and cosiness so I looked forward to being back there this Winter. In this blogpost I’ll talk and show you more about my visit…

Given that Winter Solstice or Yule happened during my stay in Vielsalm, I thought it might be fun to create and carry a “travel altar” or “portable altar”. Take a look below and see how you can make your own:

Herbal walks – collecting Springtime herbs and flowers

Springtime is my favourite season, not only because of the weather – sunny but no heatwaves yet – but also because I love to see all the blossoms and flowers appearing everywhere… It feels like a fresh start and all that colour inspires my creativity and curiosity too. In this season I love walking around, looking around, and taking some plant samples home…

Visiting the Huis van Alijn museum in Ghent

This blog post is a bit late but I still wanted to write a bit and show some photos of my visit to the Huis Van Alijn museum (“House of Alijn”) in Ghent a month ago because I really enjoyed it. Huis Van Alijn is the museum of daily life. It’s a fun museum to explore at any time because the permanent exhibition (which is regularly updated/changed) is well worth a visit and I think it’s a fun activity in these weird times. But I especially wanted to see their current exhibition about protests and parades…

Visiting the Witches exhibition in Brussels

Last week I visited the Witches exhibition in Brussels (Belgium), organised by the ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles). An entire exhibition about witchcraft and witches, I knew in advance that I was gonna enjoy it but it really went beyond my expectations. So I decided to write a little blogpost about my visit and show you some images from the exhibition. The exhibition closes by the end of this week so make sure to visit if you can!

Visiting a witch town

I was in urgent need of a pause from everything, as I’m sure we all are, so I decided to visit (or escape to) a witch town with two friends.

Visiting the Kunstenbibliotheek in Ghent

A few weeks ago I visited the Kunstenbibliotheek or “Art Library” in Ghent (Belgium) to consult their zine collection. It’s a relatively new and small collection but it includes beautiful and interesting publications. I had donated some of my zines before and during the pandemic and felt excited to finally take a look at all the zines they have…

Visiting the Industry Museum in Ghent

Last month I visited the Industry Museum in Ghent (Belgium), formerly known at MIAT. I was especially excited and impressed by their exhibition about the graphic industry and all the machines that were on display: a great variety of printing presses (some of which are still being used by the staff to print museum merch as well as posters for other organisations and projects), typewriters, stencil machines, and the oldest computers.  It was an extra fun and entertaining visit for zinesters because throughout the exhibition you could make your own mini-zine! The exhibition about textiles was intriguing too. I’m a typewriter / printing press geek AND sewing machine geek so it was the best place for me to spend the day. 🙂 (Now someone should only create a guitar pedal exhibition or museum 🙂 ).

Visit the website of the museum for more info.

Take a look at some of the photos I took:

Zine fair nostalgia

Upon request by amazing zinester and overall creator Kama Mielczarek of Weird is the Best, here are some photos of my table or stall at zine fests and craft fairs in the past. (Some of these tables were shared with creative friends Jessica Maybury, Meeni Levi, Wayfaring Moon Apothecaries, and Sister Ray Zines, and the feminist collective FEL).

International Zine Month 2021 – zinester selfie

After I shared a “shelfie” or photo of zine shelves a few days ago, it’s time for a zinester selfie!

Today’s prompt by Stolen Sharpie Revolution for International Zine Month says:

‘Take a photo of you with your zine or zine collection and post it online.”

I don’t really like to share photos of myself online and when I do, I usually hide behind the zines! 🙂 (Face masks and sun glasses are also very useful 🙂 ). I even thought about showing a drawn self-portrait instead… But in the end I did the entire prompt: photo of me + my zines + my zine collection + posting online.

By the way, I’m having quite some fun experimenting with Gimp (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) this month. I mostly use and like Photoshop for my illustration work but I recently installed Gimp on my laptop and I find it’s easy to quickly make or edit some images for this blog and social media. It’s a lot better than it used to be and totally free and open source. I can recommend it! Here are more recommendations for graphic software, fonts, and clip-art (the font I’ve been using for my July images is “Mom’s Typewriter”).

Chainsaw Bunny is less cameraphobic and wanted her photo taken too:

FAN ZIJN exhibition about music and fanzines

A few days ago I went to the exhibition FAN ZIJN (“being a fan”) in the public library of Sint-Niklaas, a small city in Belgium. It’s part of the PPPUSH-IT project, an event with walking tours and exhibitions in Sint-Niklaas related to music, and FAN ZIJN focuses on zines, fandom, music and DIY culture. You can see local and international fanzines from the 80s up till today (like Cometbus), alongside some tapes, T-shirts, and badges, as well as videos of interviews with zine makers (including Vinyldyke) and informative and encouraging tutorials. There’s a focus on punk and hardcore, riot grrrl and feminist rock, anarchist, and gothic subcultures. The original zines are shown under glass while some pages have been photocopied and stuck on panels which reminded me both of oldschool xeroxed fanzines (which of course are still made today, including by me) and posters advertising punk shows.

It’s a pity the exhibition only runs until June 20th because I wish more people could see it all throughout the summer (covid also doesn’t help). As far as I know this is the first exhibition in Belgium that focuses on zines and I really think it could make a great travelling exhibition. If you can, go see this fan-tastic expo! (I’m not just saying that because some of my zines are part of it). Register to visit on weekend days here or just go during the opening hours of the library. The exhibition can be found on the ground floor, first and second floor of the library, there is an elevator and entrance is free.

Photo time…