[if you'd like to subscribe to the magazine and not participate in the kickstarter program, please head on over to http://www.plymagazine.com/ ! US Subs are $36/year]
Here at PLY Magazine, our mission as a primary source for handspinning knowledge, technique, and opinion will be to do the following:
- support, reflect, and respond to the worldwide handspinning community
- provide in-depth material for intermediate to advanced spinners
- inspire new spinners
- celebrate the diversity of spinning and handspinners
- give a voice to spinners everywhere
- record the rich history, report on the vibrant present, and inspire the hopeful future of spinning by creating a themed, archive-worthy document of the spinning community’s aspirations, activities, and achievements.
- support indie businesses and craftspeople via affordable advertising, fair compensation, and return of intellectual property.
We love to read about spinning.
In fact, we read everything we can about the craft, the fiber that goes into it, and the people that love it — there are some great publications out there and we (urge you to) support them all. We seek to help fill out the spinning magazine world by adding to that list of greats our robust magazine full of in-depth articles. The difference? We will focus on the intermediate to advanced spinner, we will collect and reflect technical, intuitive, historical, and theoretical knowledge from handspinners the world over with the intent to inform, reflect, and inspire. To stretch skills. We want to support our amazing and diverse spinning community (spinners, fiber producers, indie fiber artists, writers, designers, and others who love fiber as much as we do), gather and share the information we all need and want, and also reflect the community in a real way. On the pages of PLY, you can expect to see names you easily recognize, names you might have heard before, and altogether new voices as well. You can even add your own voice to our efforts — everyone has something to say; and we want a range of diverse spinners' voices in our magazine!
PLY Magazine’s purpose is to serve as a kind of encyclopedia of spinning knowledge – a stamp of the current moment in spinning time, as well as a record of the evolving line of knowledge stretching out behind us. Each issue will be printed on quality paper with a printable spine so that, well into the future, you’ll be able to easily access the information within. Issues are themed so we can dig deep into a topic, get to its core, explore different viewpoints and issues, and learn all we can about it. In the interest of diversity and a never-ending quest for knowledge, we go out of our way to find new and interesting things, historic and important things, and delve as well into things we might take for granted. How it works, why it works, where it comes from, who’s doing it: these are the things we’re interested in — the things we ask our writers to explore.
Spinning is an ongoing journey; we aren’t looking for an ultimate answer. In spinning, there’s often no such thing. To that end, you’ll find PLY Magazine exploring various approaches to the same concept, technique, or project, and encouraging spinners everywhere to find themselves in their spinning. It will not be uncommon to find divergent opinions in a single issue of PLY, because that’s how the (spinning) world really is. We’ll do our best to carefully present the available facts and opinions, so you can find among them the truth that works for your own spinning hands.
We’re excited about spinning and we know you are as well — we hope you’ll join us in our exploration of everything it has to offer!
Risks and challenges
This magazine depends on the handspinning community wanting to read it! If spinners want it, there's no way it can fail. The first two issues (Summer and Autumn 2013) are already being written and designed for by spinners and designers across the globe. Our printer is eagerly awaiting our first issue. It's all happening right now!
Our goal is to use great paper to spread wonderful and rich content, to pay our contributors well, to return them the rights to their work after 18 months, and to have very little advertising (12 pages, only 10% of the total page count). This is not the regular magazine model that depends on cutting costs and raising advertising revenue but as long as you subscribe, the numbers work! In the beginning, though, we need some funding to get us started -- the initial set-up fees, you might say: people to pay, software to purchase, lawyers to pay, papers to file, and photography equipment to acquire.
We are ready to do the work if you're ready to subscribe!
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Funding period
- (45 days)