I wanted to do individual posts about these but time is running out. I’ll be off to Japan in just a few days!! Eek!

Since I wrote my Tokyo Shopping Guide after I returned from my last trip in 2007, I haven’t actually used it myself! I’m looking forward to seeing how things have changed and what to update and add to the next version. That the guide is still relevant 3 years later is due to my awesome readers who have sent me updates and feedback.

But my guide is by no means the only one! Here are 3 I’ve purchased and will be using on this trip.

Hello Sandwich Tokyo Guide (PDF and print zine)

Definitely the cutest guide by creative Australian Ebony who now lives in a too-cute apartment in Tokyo. It’s got a lovely hand-drawn and collage style design, and the info is spot-on too. It’s aimed at the first time visitor to Tokyo so there are guides to well-known areas like Shibuya and Harajuku as well as the quieter and quirkier areas like Shimokitazawa and Gakugeidaigaku. You get Ebony’s pick of the best shops and eateries, along with photos and great maps. Plus there’s tips galore on food, art, temples, transport and hotels, and even some useful Japanese phrases! Hopefully I’ll get to meet Ebony in Tokyo – if you’re a Japanophile you really should be reading the Hello Sandwich blog!

Available from hellosandwich.bigcartel.com

Little Tokyo Shops (PDF)

If you’ve visited Tokyo before, like me, and want to get off the beaten path then Little Tokyo Shops is for you. With the focus on crafts, stationery, accessories and gifts, it’s a wonderful resource of independent shops where you’ll find beautiful things to look at and buy while supporting some lovely shop owners. The first section has photos of the shops and their products along with some travel tips, but the second section is the real gem with wonderfully simple graphical maps guiding you on a wander round each area. It’s practically a few day’s itinerary already organised for you!

Available from www.etsy.com/shop/signsaysopen

My Tokyo – a Fashion and Design Shopping Guide (print and PDF)

And finally, something a little more high-end, right down to the glossy cover. If you want to visit the most stylish shops Tokyo has to offer then this in-depth guide is the one for you! Covering fashion, interiors, vintage, music, books, crafts and galleries, there really is something for everyone and each area section is packed with info and photos plus a big map. Just keep a hold of your credit card!

Available from www.etsy.com/shop/catkinandteasel

Have you read any other good guides? Do tell!

Here are photos of some of the zines made at the Zine Workshop. They were all amazing. Above is Jen‘s which she made on the train to Glasgow!

Bronwen made her first ever zine, on the subject of things she is unable to throw away. I think this has the makings of a full length zine :)

Neil made a super cute comic zine about things to do if you’re a ghost.

Aurora was the only one to use kraft paper and made an awesome zine of gestures. I think we all learned a lot from this one!

And Emma made two zines! All about the things she loves about Japan.

I also loved this zine which was made for her daughter who really wants a dog. Sorry, I forgot your name! Great use of all the materials.

This one is by Douglas. Not everyone managed to finish their zines but I think everyone was inspired to continue zinemaking. We used the 8 page booklet fold to keep things simple. There’s a video here which I think shows how to do it.

Lots more photos of these zines and others over at Flickr. If you’d like to make a zine then don’t forget to sign up for the Zine Challenge, and there are still some free zines left – see my previous post for details.

Oh, and I didn’t make a zine. After doing nothing but make, think and talk zines for the previous 5 days I was all zined out! Got lots of plans for new zines though.

Continuing the Manchester theme, here’s a zine by one of my long-lost Manchester friends, Carl Bradley. I first met Carl at a Urusei Yatsura gig in Manchester when he asked me about my Hello Kitty tshirt, but we only made friends later after some zine swapping. We eventually met up again when I visited Manchester to interview Mogwai – it was good to have some moral support and extra questions and I still count that as the most fun interview I ever did. I often wonder what happened to Carl and hope he made it over to Japan too – we were both big Japan fans.

This issue (#5) is from the height of the teen-c zine scene when zinemaking was popularised again by a group of bands led by bis. During this point in time, it was pretty much law that any zine had to have an interview with either bis, Urusei Yatsura or Mogwai. Fancy Biscuits breaks that mould a little though – it may be handwritten and full of cute manga panels, but the bands featured include Melt-Banana, Stars of the Lid, Rachel’s and Elliot Smith.

I remember always being very impressed by Carl’s ability to just get his thoughts down and keep going past his mistakes. As a bit of a perfectionist, that’s something I could never do. Loses points for my #1 fanzine pet hate though – NO STAPLES. Luckily I do still have all the pieces. One day I might use my new long-arm stapler and fix all the non-stapled zines I own. Then I’ll be happy.

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This is part of a series of posts about my epic zine collection – I’ve been collecting zines for the last 20 years and I plan to write about all of them eventually. You can find all the zine posts under My Epic Zine Collection.

I’ve retitled this section so it makes more sense – welcome to my Epic Zine Collection!

If Easy Pieces was an example of an intricate wordy zine, then here is the opposite end of the spectrum; an 8 page zine folded from a single sheet of A4 paper!

Each page features a single Japanese word and its meaning illustrated with a hand-carved rubber stamp. It’s beautifully simple but the illustrations are so sweet, I know I’ll keep going back to it for years.

You can buy your own copy, or some lovely rubber stamps from talktothesun on Etsy.

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This is part of a series of posts about my epic zine collection – I’ve been collecting zines for the last 20 years and I plan to write about all of them eventually. You can find all the zine posts under My Epic Zine Collection.

It’s pretty much impossible to choose my favourite zine since I have such a wide range, from entirely illustrated to entirely text to something inbetween, This zine is the one I normally pick out if I want to show someone what a zine can be. If you have any preconceived ideas about zines, this will likely break them into tiny pieces, and if you’ve never seen a zine before it will open your mind to all the possibilities.

Easy Pieces is a series of zines by Jon Jordan, a writer, illustrator and musician who I first met, as many did, when he worked for a music PR company in London. He used to send me awesome records to review and some actually interesting press releases, some of which I still have somewhere.

Anyway, as you can see, Easy Pieces was not your average A5 photocopied zines. Each issue was printed in a different and exciting way (I have 3 others to show you). This was the first one I owned though, and the most elaborate. It’s a bit bigger than A4 size and opens up to reveal two A4 stapled booklets that are interleafed so you open one page in one direction and the next in the other direction. The more you look at it, the more you realise just how much thought has been put into organising the content so it reveals itself as you turn the pages. All the more amazing since the whole thing is hand-drawn and lettered. I can’t even begin to think how he planned this.

Content-wise, it’s got a lovely mix of reviews, features and comment, all with related drawings whether of band members, record sleeves or just random cool stuff. Looking through it all now, I’m realising how long it’s been since I read this zine but it’s bringing back lots of memories – Jon’s writings and drawings of Mogwai were one of the main inspirations behind the Mogwai Artzine, a project I curated of art and writing about Mogwai. Jon did me an awesome illustration for it (old skool website alert – last updated 2001!) which I really must put on my wall again. There was even an Artzine 2 last year organised by diskant friends Brightlight.

Anyway, I have no idea what Jon’s up to these days – he did some great record sleeve artwork too. I hope he’s still well and drawing great things.

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This is part of a series of posts about my epic zine collection – I’ve been collecting zines for the last 20 years and I plan to write about all of them eventually. You can find all the zine posts under My Epic Zine Collection.

I love how zines seem to be big news again. I’ve had a bunch of questions recently about how to make them and I see them more and more at craft fairs. I’ve been collecting zines since the mid-nineties and have boxes and boxes of them. I thought it might be fun to post about them on here, in a random kind of way. If there’s a bad thing about zines it’s that they’re so poorly documented – if I missed buying a zine back in 1998 the chances are I’ll never get to see a copy. In my day, most zines had very limited print runs and reprints were virtually unheard of. Anyway, I’m not going to scan in every page of every zine I own but I will take a few photos of my favourite pages. I’ve already plucked out a few favourite and will get posting soon.

I’m also starting a few other new regular things on the blog, just to keep my hand in. As you may or may not know, I also blog regularly at Super Cute Kawaii and Glasgow Craft Mafia, not to mention running my diskant site so having regular topics makes it much easier not to get stuck for ideas or neglect one blog for another.

So, watch this space! I might even finish off the Bangkok Shopping Guide since most of it is in my Thailand zine now.

Anything else you’d like me to share more of?