Coming into this project, I thought making a Zine would be easy because, in spite of having never hand-crafted something myself, I would be following the directions on YouTube so I thought surely this would be simple to do. But I overestimated myself as well as underestimated the process of making a Zine because I would make multiple minor mistakes and ended up having to restart from scratch out of fear that those mistakes would all culminate in the end. The one thing I was pretty confident about was threading the needle because I have some informal experience with sewing; whenever my mother would sew, she would reach out to me to thread the needle (being that she has bad vision) and I would consistently always accomplish that task, no matter how small the eye was or how much the string would fray.

When I was directly engaging with the material objects, I found that it is very important to be patient because I was more likely to be precise with my craftsmanship, which actually helped my Zine turn out pretty decent (I would say) in the end. There would be moments where I would falter and try to rush the entire process because of how painstakingly it was to take my time (hence why I had to restart). During my engagement with the material objects, I did thought about how people made and print books back in the day. Suffice to say, it made me appreciate the skills and the attention it required to produce such physical objects.

As weird as it sounds, I think what motivates people to make Zines is how intimate it feels. Alongside that closeness you get making a Zine, you can also freely and creatively express yourself through your Zine. Zines are and feel very “one-of-one” whereas because pamphlets and magazines are manufactured and mass-produced, they not only look the same but they also feel very distant from the person actually making the object.

The role of digital media (in this case, the YouTube videos) was decently helpful in making this kind of embodied work possible because there is no one in my immediate proximity or no one that I know personally that can make a Zine, so it is a good thing that information or a skill can easily spread and reach to a massive audience in short time, to the far corners of the world from one place, through the Internet. However for me personally, I would have prefer learning to bind papers in person because there was a lot that I could have picked up sooner if I had someone physically there with me and teaching me. For example, when Johana was piercing the holes down the middle of her signature, I had thought that she did it on the left side of the signature (especially because of the top-down camera view) and accidentally did this step. It takes a lot to record a successful how-to/instructional video because aside from the obvious (like decent camera, mic, and lighting), you have to constantly make sure that whatever you’re doing is on camera so that viewers can follow along. You also have to make sure that you’re well-spoken because any possible chances of stuttering or your inability to verbally describe what you’re doing can hinder the teaching and confuse the viewers.