justinaforever

This past weekend Evan and I shared a table at Canzine Toronto. I was selling Peggy Pointer books and rocks and stuff, and Evan was selling Arcane Bullshit tarot cards. People loooved his Arcane Bullshit tarot cards, because who wouldn’t like to wield the awesome power of divine bullshit in their hands? If you haven’t checked them out, you should. www.arcanebullshit.com

Here’s a picture of us peddling our wares:

In other news, I spent all the money I made that day on stuff that I thought looked cool and felt inspired by. That was fun.

As for Peggy Pointer and me, our sales were slim, but some of my really kind friends bought books. That was REALLY nice of them.

I’ve got some photos from the book-making process, so please let me tell you about my whole entire journey.

1. I made up Peggy Pointer when I was in a REALLY boring meeting one day. At first her legs were also made of fingers, but these gave her a very bulky (not cute) appearance.
2. I vowed to come up with a “Peggy Pointer p_______ a p_______” cartoon every day. But I quit for some reason.
3. Months later, I decided to make the pictures I had into a book.
4. But the illustrations were all inconsistent. So I re-traced 25 old Peggy Pointer drawings so that the line work would be consistent.
5. I scanned all of the re-traced images into the computer, only to have Evan tell me they all looked “overworked.” Sigh.
6. I arranged everything in InDesign. This REALLY made me wish I had worked on the yearbook in grade eleven because I felt like a headless chicken inside a computer.
7. I PDFed my InDesign file and put it on a thumb drive.
8. I took my PDF file to the neighbourhood print/copy/mailbox centre where a really nice guy helped me print everything up. He even collated the pages for me. I promised to bring him a sticker for all of his help. But I am terrible at keeping promises. 😦
   (((( HERE’S WHERE THE PICTURES BEGIN!!!! ))))
9. I sewed up each copy by hand.
10. I coloured each page with a splash of yellow. No two books are alike. (I also added some red details.)
11. I put all the books in a stack. Yay!!!!!

Oh! I also sold a bunch of rocks that I stole from the beach and drew on with a black pen and yellow Sharpie. I tried to turn the smaller ones into magnets but I didn’t mix the epoxy properly and so it didn’t work out.

And guess what!!! I sold a grand total of 8 rocks to people who were willing to pay for rocks. For you economists out there, that’s a rate of 1.33333 rocks per hour. Unbelievable, huh?! Strangers are so kind. Stranger still, I was told by a girl who bought a rock that screenprinting every page of my book would have made me 58723710236% cooler. So that’s the secret?! But I think can live with being 58723710236% less cool than I could potentially be. But the strangest thing of all: when I changed the stickers from “$X” to “FREE,” people REALLY started to like them! Whoa!!!

I also had an assortment of fingerless mittens up for sale. I sold two pairs. Yay.

The end. Anybody want to buy a pair of mittens?

peggy pointer pats the peepers.