Zining Away..

On the rare occasion that I voluntarily step out ( on my husband’s insistence that I forego being a couch potato for the evening ), we ended up attending a “block party” in Abu Dhabi on valentines day. It was there where I got a chance to Ziiiiiinnneee Away. What is a zine? Yeti, you may ask me. You fold your paper 3 times into half and get 8 parts ( 2^3 = 8 ), you see art and math go hand in hand. Then you make 1 cut ( 1 ONLY ) and then you get a book like structure. Then we start drawing, you can basically express yourself in any way through a zine, be it political opinion, some strong feelings, experiences which you feel every strongly about, my zine helped me unfold my thoughts like never before. So for the next 2 hours, I drew, scribbled and doodled through the 8 pages, starting from my time in Dubai.

We had all the fun stuff beautiful colour pens, brightly coloured neon sheets, normal sheets, designer tape, stickers and even copying machine where one could Xerox beautiful designs from books for their zine. The next 2 hours were filled with stories of how our facilitator, started with this, she showed us her first ever zine about her walk to the local shop. I am not the one usually romanticising the mundane nature of everyday chores, but her zine gave me a totally different perspective about something so common.

Somewhere, the child in me experienced uninterrupted joy, so here is the child in me presenting to you zineeee ( or “zeen”) :

And now its on our switch board.

(P.S. my best friend after hearing me rave about it surprised me with some art materials to zine again <3

P.S.S : Go checkout https://www.instagram.com/7ijrawm/ the session organiser)