Make it work

I had the most amazing response to my recent post about fat and fatshion (my favourite comment was via Facebook, where my friend wrote, simply, "massive love for this mate.")  One fatshion blog that I've discovered recently and immediately enjoyed is Fatty Unbound and the blogger behind it, Kirsty, has just published a DIY fatshion/craft zine called Make It Work. 

My first forays into writing for an audience were as a fanzine writer and editor in the mid-nineties, when I published indie zine Venus, and rubbish poetry and teenage navel gazing zine Release The Pressure.  So it was with a Proustian thrill at the badly photocopied pages and typewritten text that I received my copy of Make It Work in the post earlier this week.  And Kirsty had me nodding along maniacally, muttering "YES!" under my breath, to her introduction to the zine:  To make it work... is an act of resistance.  It's refusing to be pigeonholed, to fit into the limited aesthetic offered to fat people.  It's about acknowledging that I have as much right as a straight sized person to experiment with colour, texture, pattern, silouhette and shape, without being made to feel inferior in the process.  I have no obligation to dress my body for anything else apart from myself.  Amazing!

As well as fat acceptance polemic, the zine has some fab how-to's, including crafting on a budget, how to organise a plus-size clothes swap, and instructions for DIY sweater clips.  It's fired my enthusiasm for creating (and not just clothes: I totally want to get back into zine making now).  Buy it here on Etsy.