The last few weeks of 2025 were ripe with reflection, as the ends of years always are, and this carried over into January. I’ve begun thinking about time in quintants, themed chapters. December represented the coda to my crow season of celebration, intention, and gathering. I was preparing for cat season (a time for hibernation, planning, and dreaming), and looking back on what I’d learned and what I wanted to carry forward. All this got me thinking about my art-practice and zine-making, since so much of my free time is spent creating and crafting.
What I realized is that I made more zines in 2025 than any year prior, and that proliferation led to a few revelations about my “process”. Here are the lessons I learned about art by making zines in 2025:
writing a monthly newsletter made me get over my own perfectionism
Starting the catmothcrow chronicle was the best thing I did for my art practice in 2025. I plan on writing a longer essay about this topic later, but in addition to getting me to produce more zines and helping my zine-habit become more financially sustainable (thank you Snail Mail Society members!), it caused me to get over my own tendency towards perfection. Having to write and collage a new issue of my newsletter every month — and later, an exclusive mini zine, too — it made me nimble. Every issue has a deadline: they should be in the mail by the 15th of each month. Because people are paying to subscribe to the chronicle, it motivates me to really stick to that deadline and not quibble with delaying an issue to make everything “perfect”. And I think that the chronicles I’ve created are better for it: they better capture who I am in that moment. They aren’t worked to death. Before starting the catmothcrow chronicle, I would often overwork a piece until it sort of loses it soul, erasing away any rough-edges in pursuit of capturing some mythical state of perfection that an artwork is never going to reach. I’ve learned that my work is better without all that aggressive manicuring. It feels more like my truth, my voice, is shining through.
restrictions breed creativity
And in eschewing perfection, I’ve also remembered just how freeing restrictions can be for art-making. Having a restrained palette to work from breeds creativity.
I first learned this lesson in art school, almost twenty years ago. Whitacre was my foundation-year studio professor. If you were to close your eyes and picture a stereotypical “art school teacher”, you’d probably see Whitacre. He wore all-black, looked like Pablo Picasso, and talked about things like “expressing the line.” When I told the upperclassmen at a fish weekend house party that I’d been assigned to his studio, they told me to brace myself. He was tough, intense, opaque, more interested in abstraction than narrative. Every project he assigned was meant to stretch our creativity over a variety of material or subjective hurdles. We spent a week only drawing shoes. Then we could only draw those same shoes using straight lines. For our first sculptural project, we were limited to just bamboo dowels and glue. He was all the things they’d said he’d be — pretentious, unrelenting, critical — but he taught me the value of putting limitations on my creative process.
Making zines this year often felt like a flashback to Whitacre’s class, finding new ways to express myself with only sticks and shoes. As I collaged issues of the chronicle or crafted minizines, limited to just the front-and-back of a single sheet of paper, or when I rolled for zine and had to showcase my stamp collection or include a pop-up or use only cut-n-paste tools, I found myself having to adjust and dig deep and really stretch to bring my vision to life. Restrictions breed creativity. You discover new, brilliant ways of doing things when you aren’t able to use your favorite tools and materials. Forcing yourself to edit helps you hone in on the meat of what you really want to express when you’re restricted to just one page. You have to explore and experiment when you can’t just fall back on your typical methods.
your zines don’t have to always be so serious: make silly stuff
At the very start of 2025, I published catmothcrow two: Just Another Green-Haired Zinester and its become one of the zines that I’m the most proud of. It really seems to resonate with people, and I’ve had so many unexpected conversations about hair and self-image that stem from folks reading the zine and reaching out. But the funny thing about Just Another Green-Haired Zinester is that it started out as a joke. I noticed that a buncha zinesters all have green in their hair, myself included, and decided that it must be a “zine-thing”. I envisioned a “zinester starter kit” that would arrive on someone’s door step after they published their first title, but it wouldn’t contain stickers or washi tape or a long arm stapler, just dye. “Congrats on the new zine, here’s a bottle of Good Dye Young’s Devil’s Ivy. Break out the gloves because you’re going green!”
I thought about making bumper stickers with “I’m just another green-haired zinester” on them, or t-shirts. What I landed on was creating a mini zine about my favorite green hair dyes… but when I got to writing it, I just couldn’t stop and pretty soon I’d written what would end up being a full-length, 20-page perzine. Writing Just Another Green-Haired Zinester caught me off guard. I took what I thought was a pretty silly idea and turned it into something I’m really, really proud of.
Another case-in-point is my Sanrio minizine Fake Names for Cute Creatures, in which I share what my husband thinks various Sanrio characters are named. He doesn’t know anything about Sanrio (besides Hello Kitty, of course… she’s ubiquitous), so his answers couldn’t have been more wrong. (Except for saying that Pochacco looks like Snoopy… that was right on the money!) This one gets so much traffic at zine fests, and every time someone flips through it, it makes them laugh, really living up to Sanrio’s motto of “small gift, big smile”. And yet, I almost didn’t make the zine because I thought the idea was just too silly for anyone to care. Both titles taught me that no idea is too silly or small to become a zine that’s worth writing. Zines don’t always have to be about big ideas or deep thoughts. Sometimes they can just come outta the things that make you laugh.
sometimes its okay to make a zine that’s just for you — write the zine that you need to read
On the flipside, sometimes a zine is rooted, serious, emotional. Sometimes you need to write the zine that you need to read, a personal pep-talk or affirmation, a zine that’s just for you. This isn’t a new truth that I learned this year, but writing catmothcrow three (aka my “mood ring zine”) really emphasized it for me, made it gel and feel really true. Half of that zine is pretty heavy, dense with raw feelings. The other half is pondering, writing about my boring everyday. When I put it out into the world, I didn’t expect to share too many copies because it wasn’t really a zine that I wrote for any one else but me. And even still, it’s found an audience. Kurt Morris wrote about it in the latest issue of Razorcake, and his review made me feel like a million bucks. Sometimes you’ll write a zine that’s just for you, but it’ll still resonate with people. That’s the power of perzines. My mood ring zine reminded me of that.
some ideas need time to cocoon
Writing zines, especially perzines, always takes more time than I expect. I made peace with that this year, after promising on podcasts and in penpal letters that I’d be publishing a new issue of catmothcrow in the spring. That issue (the aforementioned “mood ring zine”) didn’t come out until October. And I’m still mulling over ideas for the choose-your-own-adventure perzine that I really, really wanna write. It takes me time to write a full-length perzine, and it’s not because the writing or collaging or collating are especially tedious. It’s the ideation that takes the most time. What I’ve realized is that when I have an idea for a zine that’s a little deeper, a little more personal, I need more time to chew on the ideas, to let them cocoon and grow. It reminds me of when I raised moths for a semester in art school: they start off looking like little sesame seeds, but quickly hatch and become worms that grow exponentially as they munch on mulberry leaves. That’s how my ideation process feels: the ideas will hatch and grow really quickly in my mind. And then, just like a silkworm spinning itself into a cocoon, my ideas need to go away for a bit, marinate. The cocooning is part of my process, letting the ideas grow in the background for a bit, bounce around my subconscious, before it comes time to actually write and produce the zine.
All this used to make me feel bad. I used to push against this, and try and skip the cocoon state. That would just lead to writer’s block, or worse: I wasted my time creating tortured work that I was unhappy with and that made me miserable to write. Work that didn’t feel “right” or true, writing to just push through and write. I realized this year how important the cocoon time actually is to my process. And I think that realizing that some ideas need time to marinate is actually a part of letting go of perfectionism. I was creating an expectation for myself as to what a “perfect” art-practice would look like, instead of giving my ideas what they needed to thrive and grow and become art. I thought that if I just tried harder, I could force ideas to become finished zines before they were ready to be written. Letting go of all that, accepting that I am who I am and my art process is how it is, it was freeing.
I talked more about these lessons in my latest video, an episode that’s one big ol’ chatty craft-with-me where I collage my 2026 vision board. (You can watch it now on Youtube or the Internet Archive.) Looking backwards at my zine-making over the past year — and realizing what I learned about myself — really helped inform my goals for what’s to come.
In 2026, I want to: build more connections and deepen friendships; help grow the KC Zine Collective sustainably so we can host more community events (instead of focusing on just the convention); put my talents (zines/art/websites/project management) towards helping out existing groups that are making good trouble; give the rest of my art a chance and show up for my writing, printmaking, and illustration practices with the same intention and intensity that I give zine-making; and most of all, I want to pursue balance. Watch the video if you want to hear me talk more about these resolutions in-depth… in classic Dayna fashion, it’s a rambly one!
Did you make any zines in 2025? What has zine-making taught you about your own art practice? And what are some of your visions or goals for 2026? (That lime green dolly collage at the top of this post is my vision board for 2026!)
