pumpipatch

June 2025

My friend Phi and I made a zine together.

stich-bound quartersheet sized zine with a pixel textured wash cover. four differently stitched zines a desk messy with supplies and zines in various states of assembly. a sign that says $3-$7, @vespaaccident in sharpie, then shows a printout of two buttons from minecraft that say Done and Take Book. A single zine is left on the display stand. fran is smiling big in her glasses with her neck long and her hand full of about 30 zines. fran is outside on a blanket on some grass in her overalls holding an umbrella. She's pointing at herself incredulously. fran is like the previous image, but Phi is laying down next to her in a blue denim dress, also holding an umbrella. They are both smiling. Phi is laying down on the blanket alone with her eyes closed and her finger over her mouth, still under and umbrella. Behind her the park extends, at least 30 other people tabling with their zines.

(scroll → for more / click for fullsize)

Scanned handwritten text, Minecraft screenshots, and photos I took on my DSi. Digitally assembled in Electric Zine Maker, printed at Workshop for Independent Publishing, handbound in our apartments, and sold and traded at Autonomous Zine Fest.

Phi and I played together on a minecraft server (hosted by my friend Audrey) for a few months after she moved here. You can write books in minecraft, and it's something I always do, so I set one up on a lectern on the second floor of our house and called it "the posting corner". We'd do little journal entries about what we'd done in the game when we played solo on the server. Phi had the great idea of adapting it into a zine and the devious idea that we hand-transcribe each other's entries. She wrote mine, I wrote hers. Similarly, the sketch in her entry was actually a photo she'd sent me that I traced onto the page. The flowers in the front and back are stock photos of a poppy and a cornflower (respectively.) The cornflower is my favorite flower in the game. The "pumpkin patch" is actually the zone/base that Audrey built near spawn, but pumpipatch was just such a cute name that it stuck to the zine (and there are two actual patches of pumpkins on the largest island you can see in the screenshot near the front.) The DSi photos are from Duluth, the trail near White Sands beach, and the Fair Oaks Washburn park. The front and back covers are from me iteratively pixel blasting things in EZM after we realized we'd both hallucinated there being a good texture from the game of the front of a book. (There isn't.)

You can click here if you want all the behind the scenes explanation. Don't click here if you just want to read it without context for fun.

Thanks to the power of iframes, you can view it right here inside this webpage! (Sorry if it looks wonky.) Or if that doesn't work, the direct link is here. Also that @ on the sign in the photos up there is a functional venmo if you want to kick us some cash!