The day has arrived and my zine distro is now open! Please head over to pushpin zines where you’ll find a large selection of fabulous zines for your entertainment. I’ve had to read to them all in order to write the product descriptions so I can say with confidence that they are all definitely worth your money.

There are more exciting zines and surprises to come over the next few weeks so I hope you’ll subscribe to the pushpin blog and keep up to date. It won’t be a proper blog like this one, but I don’t want to be posting too much zine stuff over here.

You can also pick up a copy of my new zine – my guide to Glasgow! No prizes if you guessed that was the subject. I spent a lot of time on the blog post version so it seemed worth expanding into a zine for visitors. There will be a PDF version soon too.

Speaking of PDFs, all my PDF zines are now available from pushpin and not Asking For Trouble, basically because I only want to pay for one Fetch account for the digital delivery. My printed zines and book will be available from both though.

Phew! It’s been a busy old month and June is going to be even busier! I just added all my upcoming events (more on these soon), train journeys and other important dates to my iPhone calendar and now June is a sea of dots.

Anyway, hope you like pushpin and as a treat, anyone who orders something by midnight on Friday will get a free badge and the first 5 orders will get a free zine (chosen by me)*. Off you go!

*You need to order at least 1 non-digital product as I can’t send badges via email, yet. If you want a specific badge, leave a note at checkout.

Well, things have been getting very busy on the zine front. As you may note from my cool new badges, my zine distro is called pushpin. It’s got nice associations with maps and journeys and creative fun, plus if you say ‘pushpin publishing’ five times in a row you’ll instantly get my feeling of glee when I know I’ve found the perfect name.

I’m hoping to open shop on Monday but watch this space for more news. I still have a lot of work to do, but I’ve been getting parcels of ace zines in the post all week, plus I’m plotting some fantastic collaborations that I can’t wait to reveal.

By fantastic coincidence, I will also be selling at my very first zine fair next week, so you can come along and browse the zines in real life! I can’t believe it took almost 20 years of zinemaking before I got to attend a zine fair.

In other exciting news, I decided I should make a new zine for the zine fair, in just one week! But then I realised there was yet another bank holiday on Monday and the printers would be closed so instead I made a new zine in 24 hours! Admittedly, it is based on something I originally posted on my blog, which may give you a hint to its content. All will be reveealed very soon. Meanwhile, back to writing zine descriptions and editing images.

If you’re free next Thursday, then do come by the Free Hetherington Zine Fair. It’s at Glasgow Uni and it runs from 3pm-7pm so you can swing by after work.

So, my new side-venture is a zine distro, an online shop selling zines and self-published books! Obviously zines and zinemaking is very important to me so I thought it was time to share the love.

I’ll be stocking zines and books by me, my friends and people I admire and they’ll all be things I’ve read and loved myself. To help with that, I’m focusing on certain subjects, which may or may not be clear from the web icons above – Japan, travel, illustration, crafts and personal stories.

I’m hoping to be able to open shop at the end of the month but I’m still looking for awesome things to stock so if you make zines, or know of any good ones I would like then please email me at hello@askingfortrouble.org. And if you completed my zine challenge (or when you do), I’ll be happy to give your zine a chance in the shop.

As well as selling zines, I’ll also be offering publishing help ranging from free advice to design and print services, so if you want to make a zine but don’t know how to lay it out for printing, or how to create a PDF version, I’ll be able to help you out for very reasonable prices.

I’ll be back with more details nearer the time but start saving your pennies for some great new reading.

Having zero interest in the Royal Wedding and with Glasgow plagued with crazy winds, I spent the bank holiday weekend working! Project Clearout is now back on track and I think this is my last lot of stuff to sell on eBay. There’s some good stuff up, including a pile of cotton fabric, a load of magazines (including Craft), my old Polaroid camera and a book of cool Scandinavian knitting patterns. I don’t even knit but I like the patterns a lot. There’s also some sewing thread, vintage make your own buckles packs and a few cute things so please have a look and help me clear some space!

While digging around in my blog organising Tokyo Shopping Guide stuff, I was reminded that I never got to complete my Bangkok Shopping Guide ‘cos of all the protests and things. To make up for that, I’ve posted up the entire short version (from my Thailand zine), along with some nice photos so hopefully it will still be of some help to anyone taking a trip there.

I also finally updated Super Cute Kawaii with a fun new look. I started the redesign before the whole hand incident so it was good to get this finished at last. I guarantee we are the only blog in the universe that has a skiing cinnamon bun on staff.

And, I ordered some new wrapping paper! You’ll have to wait and see what design I got. Which reminds me, I need to order the matching tags and stickers now.

It’s time to pick the winners! Thanks everyone who entered – there were lots of great questions. The main thing I learned is that I appear to be extremely content with my life – I don’t want to live anywhere else, I don’t want to do any other job, I don’t really want to go anywhere in a time machine. It’s true though – I am doing exactly what I want to be doing, and a lot of that is thanks to you guys!

So, anyway, the winner is sfer, because I picked my favourite questions without checking the comments and discovered 3 of them were by her, so that was a clear win.

My favourite was Is it hard for you to balance work/family/free time? Do you have any tips on that? as I’d never really written about that, and people seem to be quite taken by my reply. I do think setting a schedule is the best thing I’ve done since going self-employed.

I also liked Imagine you wake up tomorrow only to learn you have won A LOT of money at the lottery. What would you do that day?, as it’s always fun to think about that.

Congratulations sfer! I’ll email you soon so you can choose your fabric.

I also picked three runners-up:

Angeliki, who asked some fun questions about Glasgow including
what is that you like so much in Glasgow?what makes it special for you in Glasgow?

Robin, who asked what’s your favorite part of the creative process?.

Erin Ferree, who asked Why do you like bunnies so much?, a question many people probably wonder :)

They all win a surprise package of stuff from my shop.

One bad bit of news: Spoonflower is currently about 4-5 weeks behind on printing orders so not only will the winner have a big wait for their fabric but it’ll be a while before I can put my new designs up for sale as I need to order swatches of them all first. Booo. Hopefully they’ll get caught up soon.

Feel free to ask any other questions you have any time, and I’ll probably do this again next year too.

ONE: Time Out Tokyo have a free downloadable magazine available with 50 things to do in Japan this Spring. It really makes me want to go back. It also has some great maps, travel info etc. so well worth a download if you plan to visit Japan any time soon.

TWO: I’ve started a separate Twitter account for Japan stuff so I don’t bore my friends. If you want to know when I add things to the online Tokyo Shopping Guide, be the first to know when the new zine is available and get some random tips and links then come follow me at @tokyoshopguide.

Fabric Giveaway winners tomorrow!