The Weekend I Stopped Polishing and Made a Zine Anyway

I have a bad habit of making creative projects sound much more impressive than they are. I will spend three weeks talking about an idea, another week choosing a font, and then quietly abandon the whole thing because it is not perfect yet. So on a grey weekend in November 2026, I decided to try the opposite. I would make a zine in two days. Not a beautiful, launch-ready zine. Just a real one, folded and stapled and handed to actual people.

The brief I gave myself

The rules were deliberately unglamorous. It had to be A5. It had to be 16 pages, including the cover. It had to be made from things I already had or could buy locally for under £30. And I was allowed one proofread. Not two, not a full redesign, not a last-minute panic about whether the whole thing was any good.

I called it Loose Ends, which felt appropriately honest. The plan was a small collection of half-finished thoughts, lists and drawings about creative projects that never quite get finished. Very meta, slightly self-indulgent, but it gave me a theme to hang the weekend on. The point was not to produce a masterpiece. The point was to stop treating every idea like a job application.

Saturday: planning, printing and mild panic

Saturday morning started well. I made tea, put on BBC Radio 4 in the background and roughed out the pages on scrap paper. I chose a limited colour palette because I had two felt-tip pens on my desk and no intention of buying more. I wrote the text by hand, which was quicker than fiddling about with layout software and also meant I could not spend an hour choosing a typeface.

The printing was where reality arrived. I went to my local library and used the photocopier, which cost me £11.20 for 25 copies of a 16-page A5 booklet. I bought card for the covers at a stationery shop for £4.50, two glue sticks for £3, and envelopes and stamps for £6.80. Total spend: £25.50. I am not going to pretend that is nothing, but it is also less than a takeaway and a cinema ticket, and it gave me a whole weekend of something to do.

By Saturday afternoon I had a stack of printed pages and a mild sense of dread. The pages were not quite aligned. My handwriting looked more chaotic than I remembered. One drawing had a coffee ring on it. I had to remind myself of the rule: one proofread, then move on.

Sunday: glue, trimming and the joy of a deadline

Sunday was assembly day. I am not a natural crafter. I own one pair of scissors that are probably meant for kitchen use and a glue stick that had been in a drawer since roughly the last time I made a birthday card. The first copy took about 20 minutes. The second took 10. By the fifth, I had developed a system involving a cutting mat, a ruler and a lot of muttering.

There were disasters. I glued two pages together, tried to peel them apart, and created a small papier-mâché corner. I trimmed one cover so aggressively that it was more of a trapezoid than a rectangle. I do not own a long-arm stapler, so I used a needle and thread for the binding, which sounds much more deliberate than it was. The first three copies are genuinely wonky. I have kept one of them because it makes me laugh.

But something surprising happened in the middle of the mess. I stopped caring about the imperfections. The zine was not a portfolio piece. It was a thing that existed. I had made a decision on Saturday and by Sunday evening there were 25 copies sitting on my kitchen table, ready to go to a few friends and a local craft swap. That is more than I can say for most of my creative ideas this year.

What 48 hours actually taught me

The deadline was the real editor. When I have months to work on something, I can keep reopening the same paragraph until it turns to mush. When I have 48 hours, I have to choose. Does this page need another draft, or does it need to be finished? Most of the time, it needed to be finished.

The constraints helped too. A fixed page count meant I could not keep adding ideas. A limited colour palette meant I stopped browsing for supplies. The cheap photocopier meant the zine had a slightly rough, photocopied texture that I ended up liking more than a glossy print. Limitations are not always a compromise. Sometimes they are the thing that gets you to the end.

And the wonkiness is not a failure. It is evidence that a person made it. I have spent a lot of time this year trying to make things look effortless, which is exhausting and also a bit boring. A glue-stick smear is at least honest.

Would I do it again?

Yes, but I would change two things. I would buy a long-arm stapler, because threading 25 copies by hand is a young person's game. And I would start with a slightly firmer theme, because Loose Ends got a bit loose by page 12. But those are small fixes. The bigger lesson is that I do not need a perfect idea or a free month. I need a weekend, a rule and a reason to hand something to another human being.

If you have been sitting on a creative idea, I am not going to tell you to make a zine. But I will say this: the version you finish badly is more useful than the version you polish forever. Mine is sitting on the table now, slightly crooked, and I am oddly proud of it.