Stack: December

Stack ended on a high note for me with two magazines, both of which I enjoyed and both of which I would buy again!

Works That Work
This was a bit of a puzzle when I opened up the envelope it arrived in: a grey cover, that on closer inspection was a picture of racks of fish hanging outside in the snow. I think I'd describe Works That Work as a design magazine, but I'd feel like I was underselling it as I did. It's really a testament to human ingenuity and problem-solving, although I guess that's not really a section in most shops.

This issue is based around extreme environments – deserts, war zones, the Arctic – and the things that people have built in them: homemade guns and stoves made from scrap during the siege of Sarajevo; a temporary city of 30 million people for a Hindu festival; a rocket intended for Mars built by amateurs in their spare time. It's fascinating, weird, sad and delightful all at once.

Would I buy it again? Yes, despite its outrageous cover price of £13.

Belleville Park Pages
Belleville Park Pages is a great idea. It's a tiny thing, made from a single sheet of A3 paper folded four times, and it contains a mixture of poetry and prose by new writers (there are 12 pieces in this issue). I liked the idea of Belleville Park Pages so much I wanted to like everything in it. I didn't, but I liked some enough to look up the authors online, which seems like the point of this magazine.

Would I buy it again? Yes. This is the most straightforward answer I have ever had to this question.

Stack: November

I get quite excited about my Stack deliveries so the delay on this month's delivery built up my expectations to unreasonable heights. In the end, this month's Stack, huck, was alright. Its strapline is "radical culture" and its contents are a mixture of culture, especially music, and left-wing politics. It's an easy read – I read it from cover to cover on my way to work over a couple of days – and it was enjoyable, but it left me thinking of this song:



huck is a counterculture magazine that wants me to think corporate rock is for suckers, but comes with a £30 voucher for a shop where I can buy a £201 jacket. And I'm not sure it has any sense of irony about that.

Would I buy it again? I honestly don't know. I enjoyed it, I just thought it lacked self-awareness. Maybe if there was a particularly compelling cover story?

Graffiti

Behind the BFI Southbank.

Stack: October

This month's Stack was an interesting experience: two magazines, one of which I enjoyed more than the other, but in answering the question "would I buy it again" I realised that I'm more likely to pick up the one I liked less in future.

hello mr.
hello mr.'s strapline is "about men who date men". I love a subtitle that explains exactly what you're getting and hello mr. is perfectly encapsulated by its subtitle. It's a collection of writings – personal essays, interviews, poems, etc. – by gay men, and while sexuality is a huge part of the content, it can also be entirely incidental to the experiences being described, for example, "Scarred" and "Libra with Cancer" are both about dealing with serious illness at a young age. The writing styles and topics are hugely varied, (understandably, as the authors' main point of commonality is their sexuality), and it's beautifully designed and well-edited. Overall, it's a lovely product, although I'm keenly aware that I'm not the right demographic for it.

Would I buy it again? I really enjoyed reading hello mr., but ultimately I'm not the intended audience for this magazine and I felt like a tourist reading it. I'm not going to buy it again, but I hope it does well.

Root + Bone
Root + Bone is a free London-based food magazine, the content of which is a mixture of restaurant reviews, recipes and articles about food, cooking and eating. At its best the writing was enthusiastic and genuine, if unpolished, but too often it veered into a laddishness that irritated me. It might have been a problem with this particular issue, which focused on unconventional ingredients and methods of cooking and at times gave me the distinct impression the writers wanted me to know just how "crazy" they were. That said, the restaurant reviews made me want to try a number of new places and some of the recipes look amazing. I really wanted to like this, but overall I found it frustratingly hit and miss.

Would I buy it again? Because it's free I'd probably pick it up again for the restaurant reviews and the recipes despite not particularly enjoying its editorial style.

Life-drawing at Candid Arts, Islington

White jacket

About a year ago I bought this white linen jacket from asos.

 
I bought it for my wedding as I realised that I had a sleeveless wedding dress and a wedding that would be taking place largely outdoors in England in October. The weather actually ended up being really good, although I was glad of the jacket at the end of the day.

Stack: September

September's Stack delivery is boat, a travel magazine. Each issue of boat focuses exclusively on a single city and this issue is about Los Angeles. Of course, this is Stack so boat isn't a typical travel magazine. There's no guide to the best places to eat or the top 10 attractions to visit. Instead, boat is a series of articles by, and interviews with, residents of Los Angeles in which they ruminate on aspects of life in the city.

And it was a great read. It needed some better copy-editing, but the actual articles were compelling and gave a great sense of L.A. as a city. I previously had no interest in going to L.A., but boat made me want to visit so that seems like a solid endorsement for a travel magazine.

Would I buy it again? Yes, if there was an issue on a city I was going to. I actually looked to see if they had a past issue on Berlin as I might be there next month, but sadly they've not gone there yet.

Curtain

I live in a first floor flat. It's a nice place, but when we moved in it was cold. This was mostly due to the hilarious lack of insulation in the loft. That was sorted out pretty quickly and things improved a lot. However, on particularly cold days there was still a draft coming up the stairs and straight into the main bedroom.

Graffiti

Found on the pavement of Snowsfields by London Bridge.

Stack: August

It's taken me a while to sit down and write something about IdN, this month's Stack delivery. Usually I try and read about 75% of the magazine before I post something, but with IdN every time I open it I get completely overwhelmed, flick through it for a bit and then close it without making any progress.

It's a design magazine, although compared to Printed Pages it's such a different beast that it seems strange to put them in the same category. IdN is a blur of product design, street art, graphic design, and installations; images fill the pages, swamping the tiny paragraphs of tiny text. As a reading experience it's pretty terrible, but as a design showcase it's great.

My favourite part of IdN is that it also showcases animation. Apparently it used to come with a DVD, but this material has now moved online and is accessed with a password provided by the magazine. This issue's theme is Geometry in Motion Graphics Design and there's a lot of fantastic videos to watch, although my favourite is a music video that can also be seen here.

Would I buy it again? No. But I recommend it as a source of inspiration to designers and animators everywhere.

Life-drawing at Candid Arts, Islington

It's been almost a year since I last went to Candid Arts. My favourite drawing from this set is the eighth one.

Stack: July

This month's Stack is Intern, the magazine by interns for interns!

In all seriousness, this is actually pretty good. There's been a lot of focus in the US and the UK recently on unpaid internships and their value to the individual and the economy. Intern explores that debate, interviewing people in the creative industries about internships. There's a variety of voices in this issue: young people in internships; creative professionals who have done internships; creative professionals strongly opposed to unpaid interns. Interestingly, it's not just focused on social debate; the magazine also includes photography, fiction and poetry, making it a creative outlet as well as a platform for political/social discussion.

Overall, it was an engaging read. It's a very polite magazine though; there are no polemics about social injustice to be found here, just well-articulated thoughts about how things could be improved. I'm not sure if you really start a labour movement that way, but I don't think Intern is looking to mobilise anyone so much as make them think.

Would I buy it again? This is yet another that I'd buy for someone else, but not for myself. If I had a younger friend or relative who had just graduated and was looking for or already in an internship it might be something I'd want to share with them.

T.Rex

This is going to be the last automata for the forseeable future! This one comes Flying Pig Ltd, the same company that made the Skiing Sheep. I didn't take any construction photographs this time, but it was very easy to put together.

Battling Knights

A superior product to the Executioner! The pieces for the Executioner had to be cut out by hand, while the pieces for this are pre-cut and just need to be pressed out of the sheets of card. Also, a thicker card is used for the horses and the mechanism, while a thinner card is used for the knights, making them much easier to bend into position. Construction photographs after the cut.

Comics Unmasked at the British Library

Entry: Between free and £10.50 depending on where you fit into the British Library's hierarchy of concessions

The British Library currently has an exhibition on British comic writers and artists called Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK. I went last weekend and have been grappling with this review for the last week. The experience was actually very reminiscent of the Barbican's animation exhibition: a high entry fee, material arranged thematically and a superficial look at the subject. Again, I went in with high expectations, (Dave McKean was the art director!), but overall I was a bit disappointed.

Stack: June

This month's Stack delivery was the dual-language magazine Perdiz. Perdiz is about happiness, or more accurately, some of the things that make some people happy: karaoke, drugs, shoelaces, photography and storm-chasing are some of the things covered by this issue alone.

Each Stack delivery arrives with a letter from the founder of Stack that introduces the magazine and tells you how great it is. I haven't really felt the need to mention them until now when this month's letter described Perdiz's content as "slightly unhinged", which is a pretty accurate summary of how I felt reading it. It skips between wildly disparate subjects with manic glee, perfectly capturing the fine line between enthusiast and obsessive. It even looks pretty strange. Check out the exposed spine:

All text is in both English and Spanish, with Spanish being the first language of the Perdiz staff. The occasionally clunky English translations just add to the general sense of delightful oddness. The whole experience was endearingly weird. Perdiz is definitely something very different.

Would I buy it again? It's quite expensive, so probably not. That said, I found myself thinking about it quite a bit afterwards. I mean, I learnt that I tie my shoes in the same way as the world's foremost expert on shoelaces! (We both favour the Over Under style of lacing, in case you wondered.) That made me pretty happy actually...

Executioner

This took a long time to put together! (After the cut are some photos from its month-long construction.)

Stack: May

I've been carrying this month's Stack around for two weeks, reading it from cover to cover and wondering what on earth I'm going to write about it. This month's delivery is Offscreen, "a print magazine about the people behind bits and pixels". Broadly speaking, it looks at people who have founded or are running technology businesses, and that covers people from the CEO of moo.com, which prints business cards, to the founder of Kickboard, a program to help schools track students' progress. The contents are a series of interviews, some pages long and some only a few paragraphs long, and this issue profiles at least 25 people.

I've been struggling with what to say about it because I found myself a bit ambivalent about Offscreen. It's fascinating – reading it from cover to cover wasn't a chore by any means – but it also feels so aspirational that I kept thinking it was trying to sell me something. This is despite the fact that it has no traditional adverts! (Companies can sponsor Offscreen, and if they do they get a page in the sponsors section of the magazine. All the sponsor pages are black with white text so it's very clear that they're separate from the rest of the magazine and I really enjoyed this clear distinction of content and advertising.) There's obviously a lot of success in the interviews, but there's a lot of emphasis on happiness and personal fulfilment too. There's a repeating narrative about founding and running a successful business that also gives something back to the world or changes it for the better in some way and helps you grow as a person. As well as photographs of their subjects at work, the longer articles also include photographs of their subjects relaxing: gardening, cycling through the streets of Portland, sharing a coffee with laughing co-workers.

Aspiring to start a personally-fulfilling business is a great thing, but I doubt it's as easy as these profiles make it sound. Offscreen is not a how-to guide for launching a business or developing a new technology, but if you want to do those things you'll find a lot of inspiration in its pages – stories of people who did those things and succeeded. If you don't, you might find its evangelical passion a bit offputting. It's an interesting magazine, but I found myself wondering who its audience is, who reads it regularly. Two weeks later I'd still love to know.

Would I buy it again? I don't think so, but I'm not really sure. It's another one that I might buy for somebody else – maybe if any of my programmer friends ever launch their own start-up I'll send them a copy!

Chloe Early: Suspended at The Outsiders Gallery

Entry: Free

As promised back in February I did go to the Chloe Early show at the Outsiders Gallery. This is the first time I've been to this gallery and it is a weird space. The upstairs looks pretty much as you'd expect, apart from having a front door that looks like it belongs to an old-fashioned pub, but the basement consists of two oddly-shaped rooms, one of which you have to duck to get into, with unpainted walls. It basically looks like its owners haven't finished it yet, but it's been there for some years.

The Chloe Early show was as beautiful as I expected. Her paintings of women falling/flying/jumping are full of life and motion. The photographs online don't do them justice at all; in person, the shimmer of metallic paints, the splatters of bright colour and the texture of the brushstrokes give the impression of movement. It's as though these women could plummet back down to earth or escape even higher at any second.

In addition to the paintings there's also a short film playing in the low-ceilinged basement room. It intercuts shots of Early painting with close-ups of swirling washes of paint and shots of her models leaping. Everything is in slow-motion, set to a haunting instrumental soundtrack. Here it's Early herself we see suspended, frozen in the midst of creating these paintings. It's a lovely counterpart to the rest of the exhibition.

Stack: April

This month's Stack was another double whammy: Printed Pages and Your Days Are Numbered.

Printed Pages
Printed Pages is the print spin-off of online magazine It's Nice That. It is indeed nice. Its tagline is "championing creativity across the art and design world" and its scope is just as broad as that suggests. This issue includes an interview with Jon Link and Mick Bunnage of Modern Toss, a conversation between Tavi Gevinson and Minna Gilligan of Rookie, photographs by Bruno Drummond and Gemma Tickle, and profiles of people who work in various galleries and museums across London.

It's all very pleasant, with high production values and people talking about how great it is making things. It also felt a little bland, although some of my indifference might have stemmed from comparing this to the other magazine in April's delivery...

Would I buy it again? Probably not. It was an enjoyable read on the Tube, but it didn't grab my attention.

Your Days Are Numbered
Printed Pages looks just a little too staid and earnest alongside Your Days Are Numbered. This slim, free magazine about comics is published four times a year and, based on the strength of this issue, it's bursting with energy and irreverence. It's a mixture of short interviews and even shorter reviews, and the team behind it have had loads of fun with the layouts, which obviously incorporate lots of illustrations. It's clearly going to be a drain on my bank balance though, I have eight books to add to my wish list as a result of reading this magazine.

Would I buy it again? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, although it's free so this would actually be unnecessary. You can supposedly pay to have a year's worth of issues delivered to your house - which I was going to do! - but there's nothing in their online shop. Get it together, guys, I would give you some money if I could.

Bookbinding, week 12

This is my final bookbinding post! It's a long one as it covers everything about making the little soft-cover jotter except folding the paper.

It starts with the sections being sewn together. I wrapped a sheet of cream paper around every other green section before sewing the sections so that the cream is evenly distributed throughout.

Bookbinding, week 11

So, the case I made last week was the wrong size. The spine was about 5mm too wide as can be seen in the picture below.

Let's skip over me making a second case and get to the point where I could finally glue the lid and tray to the case. First the lid:

Bookbinding, week 10

Below is a photograph of the tray and the lid of the box, now covered and lined. When the lining is glued in it needs to be weighted or pressed to ensure it ends up completely flat. What I forgot to photograph was the other side, which is currently uncovered. A case will cover the other side and connect both pieces.

Stack: March

This month's delivery – The Ride Journal – was the kind of thing I was expecting from Stack: a really compelling magazine that I would not have bought for myself because it's about a subject I have no interest in. Ostensibly this is a cycling magazine and as I'm the sort of nervous cyclist who can't take her hands of the handlebars I wouldn't have bought a cycling magazine in a hundred years. But The Ride Journal isn't here to tell you what bike to buy, instead its contributors write short pieces about their personal relationship to cycling. There are articles about competing in races and designing bikes, about people met while cycling and strange places cycled across. There's a brilliant pair of articles about bicycle theft called “Thief” and “Taken”. There's a man who writes about the bike rides he made following the death of his infant son and a woman who writes about abandoning cycling as a teenager after a bike ride led her to discover her mother's infidelity. There's a series of photos showing a morning commute through London and another one showing a muddy, cross-country race in Belgium. It's about cycling, whatever that means to its readers and writers.

It looks stunning too; most articles are accompanied by gorgeous illustrations in a huge range of styles. It's even heftier than and it breaks up its uncoated pages with some glossy photographic sections such as the Belgian race photographs. It's beautiful and interesting and I'm really pleased to have received a copy.

Would I buy it again? Not for myself, but I would definitely get this as a gift for a keen cyclist.

Bookbinding, week 9

The lid of the box is basically made the same way as the tray, only it's slightly bigger so it fits over the tray. Let's skip that and move on to something new: lining the tray and the lid. Measure the width and height of the inside of the tray, (if one side is shorter than the other use the smaller measurement), then deduct 1mm from each measurement. Cut two pieces of board to this size.

Bookbinding, week 8

After getting off to a bad start with the box, (measure twice, cut once!), I'm back on track. The first step was cutting the pieces for the tray.

Artist Textiles at the Fashion and Textile Museum

Entry: £8.80 adults / £6.50 concessions / £5.50 students

The Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey currently has a great exhibition of textiles designed by fine artists of the 20th century. Ranging from the 1910s to the 1960s, it shows how loose the boundaries between art and commercial design really are, showcasing mass-produced printed textiles by artists including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Joan Miró.

The material on show is primarily textile samples. There are also plenty of items of clothing, some advertising material, and some surrealist film footage. Overall it's a fun, light-hearted exhibition – you get the sense that the artists got a chance to kick back and play around with themes and motifs they were best-known for when doing this kind of commercial design work. It's also fascinating to see how these artists embraced the opportunity to make their work more widely available to the public; Picasso was even involved in designing prints for a range of skiwear! I was surprised by how much I liked Andy Warhol's simple, playful designs, and I loved Dalí's “Desert Rocks” fabric.

Overall, I spent an enjoyable hour looking around, although I suspect that the price is off-putting unless you're particularly into textile design.

Bookbinding, week 7

Gluing the book cloth to the cover, staring at the spine and then smoothing it over the covers.

Resized zombie t-shirt

Advance warning: this is going to be an image-heavy post.

James was getting rid of the t-shirt below and when James gets rid of tops I get first dibs on them. It's a Threadless design, although it looks as though it's no longer available.

Red cardigan

I don't think I'm alone in trying on clothes and thinking, “well, it's nice, but it would be better if it was longer/shorter/a different colour/fit better around the shoulders/etc.” The greatest thing about learning to knit and sew has been the realisation that I can now make those changes myself.

This cardigan was knitted for me by my Mum. (The pattern is Vodka Lemonade by Thea Colman and it's available from Ravelry.) I love the colour and the design, but it was getting very little wear because it doesn't close.

So I put a zip in.

I didn't do anything fancy, just bought a 22” open-ended zip, pinned it to the cardigan and sewed it down. I'm really pleased with it and I can't believe it took me so long to get around to doing this. The hardest part was getting the zip!

Stack: February

James's first comment when I opened February's Stack was, “That's not a magazine; that's a book.”, which will tell you what a chunky beast VNA, this month's magazine, is. It's smaller than A4, but 162 lovely, heavy, matt pages. And what's it about? “Street art, graffiti, illustration and art culture”. I am delighted with this month's selection!
 

VNA profiles a series of artists – each article is obviously accompanied by extensive photographs of the artists' work – with a concluding section of photographic profiles of specific cities, (in this issue its London, Hong Kong and Łódź). It's beautiful, interesting and exactly up my street; I read it from cover to cover over the last week.

Would I buy it again? Absolutely. And I'll be checking out exhibitions by Chloe Early and Nick Sheehy later this year!

Bookbinding, week 6

If I had made it to the class last week I would have a finished book right now! The teacher's plan was that we would all make a book before the half-term break and then a box for the book after the break; alas, I will be one of the people finishing my book after half-term.

I took twice as many photographs as I've posted here, but basically this week was all about building up the spine with layers of paper. The first layers were folded to create a hollow that the book cloth will eventually be tucked into, but after that it was just cutting and gluing rectangles into place. Unsurprisingly, the side furthest from you is the side you mess up and don't cover properly!

To Leave a Light Impression at White Cube Bermondsey

Entry: Free

Having suggested that I might abandon the blog this year, I've since decided to try posting twice a week until the end of my bookbinding course. In a surprising turn of events I actually have posts lined up for about the next month.

It's been over six months since I last wrote an exhibition review, which seems ridiculous. 2013 was quite busy to say the least. However, on Friday I went to the White Cube in Bermondsey at lunchtime to see an exhibition of Darren Almond's work, To Leave A Light Impression. The show comprises work from two series of photographs by Almond – Fullmoon and Present Form – and some small bronze sculptures.

His photographs are beautiful. They're huge shots of breath-taking landscapes, backlit so they glow. The Fullmoon series were taken at night by the light of a full moon with a long exposure, although this is not at all apparent from looking at them, (there's one picture where you can see the progress of the stars across the night sky). The Present Form series captures the Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. This stone circle was erected over 4,000 years ago and Almond's enormous photographs do a good job of showing just how strange and monumental they are.

While all the images are lovely I have to admit to being l a bit disappointed by this show. If you take photographs of stunning landscapes, then your photographs are obviously going to look stunning. Almond has travelled widely and used some unusual techniques to take these photographs, but I didn't feel blown away by them. I expected something dramatically different to the usual landscape photography I see and that just wasn't there.

The White Cube also has exhibitions by He Xiangyu and Franz Ackerman.

No bookbinding today

Sadly, London's current transport strike made getting to Morely College a bit tricky this evening.

Now if only we could combine the two...*

Looking back at some other posts it appears that I write a lot about gifts that I've been given. It's not that I'm continuously showered with presents, but that my friends and family are all very thoughtful people who give excellent gifts. For example, for my last birthday three of my friends, (women I've known for over a decade now), gave me the following:

• a personalised mug for tea
• fancy gin from a local distillery 
• this cross-stitch kit

What is best in life? Tea, gin and textile crafts about tea and gin.

I've used the mug every week since then and the gin is almost all gone, but I had a memory of trying cross-stitch in my early teens and not really enjoying it so I didn't break open the kit straight away. I finally opened it last weekend and it was really easy! Why did I think it was difficult? It took an afternoon to make these, (I opted to use them as magnets instead of coasters so I could put them on the huge, magnetic whiteboard in the kitchen):

You get a substantial amount of material with the kit – there are three skeins of embroidery floss and you use hardly any on the design – although the instructions aren't very detailed. They seem to be generic instructions for all of the kits in the range rather than specific to that kit. However, it was pretty easy to figure out what to do. I had fun with these and would definitely recommend them to anyone looking to get into, (or back into), cross-stitch.

*There are actually plenty of cocktail recipes combining tea and gin. This one looks particularly good, if labour-intensive.

Bookbinding, week 4

This week, we attached the head and tail bands.

Stack: January

One of my Christmas presents was a subscription to Stack.

Basically, you subscribe and every month they send you a different independent magazine. You don't know in advance what they're sending: it's a surprise. I've decided to review the magazines I receive from Stack over the course of 2014.

In January's delivery there were actually two A3-sized magazines: the Jashanmal Quarterly and Victory.

Bookbinding, week 3

This week in pictures.

Hen party crafts

In the last year I've been to two hen parties that involved crafting. My favourite was the one where the bridesmaids asked everyone to contribute a triangular flag so they could make the bride a length of bunting as a surprise gift. They gave everyone a template so all the flags would end up the same size and stressed that they could be decorated in absolutely any way.

I used some fabric offcuts that I had (the background is a remnant from this skirt) and appliquéd some images that meant something to me and the bride onto the background.

(The bride added the bunting to her wedding decorations!)

Bookbinding, week 2

Snakeskin Wristwarmers

About a year ago I started writing a knitting pattern for wristwarmers with a scaly pattern on them. This pattern is finally finished and written up neatly. It can be downloaded from here or it can be found on Ravelry under "Snakeskin Wristwarmers". Enjoy!

Good grief...

...where did the end of 2013 go?

I saw these guys chilling out over Christmas and it pleased me no end.

I have a couple of posts to go up over the next week and I've just started a bookbinding course, but I don't have any long term plans for this blog. 2014 might be the year I put it on ice. We'll see what it brings.