The insights into past week’s happenings are written by sisterNr°2: Thea. The soundtrack is a song which I found watching the trailer of the remake of “Much Ado About Nothing”: “Rose Rouge” by St. Germain. Play this tune and read more about sisterMAG’s past week.

After our meeting with Gudy on Monday (blog post here), we spent this week at home in Freiberg, where we started working on the new cover dress for issue N°8.
At this point we just want to send our best thoughts and wishes out to all of our friends and family at home, living in Passau or Saxony, near the rivers Elbe, Danube or Inn because the heavy rainfalls of the last weeks have again resulted in a horrible flood situation. Our grandparents are housebound themselves and lets just keep our fingers crossed that the situation returns to normal.

Unfortunately I cannot tell you too much about our work during the week because the cover dress will (of course) remain a surprise. Lets say that: Our fingers are covered in blisters because of the hot glue gun and the material we’ve used has never been featured on a sisterMAG before :)
The rest of this week was spent with meetings and coffee-dates with many friends and people of the sisterMAG circle!

The translator – Coffee in Leipzig with Sarah

For a very brief encounter we stopped in Leipzig on Friday and used the time to grab a coffee with one of our translators: Sarah. Sarah and I have known each other since school days, sat next to each other in advanced history course (and studied the extensive folders of history knowledge for the ‘Abitur’) and celebrated the end of school days together.
Currently Sarah is finishing up her Masters degree in translation in Leipzig and translates – together with two colleagues – the issues of sisterMAG.

Location: “Hotel Seeblick” on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße in Leipzig’s district “Südvorstadt”

Our new intern – Breakfast with Lisa in Mitte
Last week we also received a lovely email from Fulda. It came from Lisa (@lisa_gjfd) who asked us whether we (as many of the big publishing houses) exclude pupils from internships. Of course not! Thus, we look forward to Lisa helping us this summer during her holidays with an internship at Carry-On Publishing. We have enough things to do and are really excited for her joining the team. Time flew by quickly as we exchanged thoughts on studies, future plans and online magazines on Saturday morning.

Location: “Petit Fleury”, Weinbergsweg in Berlin Mitte (the little sister of the café “Café Fleury” with wonderful French tartes and a classical French touch in interior design)

sisterMAG supporter since day one – Weekend with Anna
The week/end was also full of ideas, discussions and input for new magazines, the section pages and the new covers. Our mom (@evin on Pinterest) always has a lot of ideas and the time in Freiberg was very valuable to develop the editorial plan. Secondly my very good friend Anna (@AS7688), who helps since the early days of sisterMAG spent a weekend in Berlin and filled my brain with conversations around scripts, workflow automation in Indesign and new internet technologies :).

On Saturday we strolled along Kurfürstendamm (a faster way of walking was not possible due to shopping crowds and raucous DFB Cup Final fans) to visit Berlin’s first “& Other Stories” store. The new label from H&M apparently did its research well and listened to fashion bloggers: the website (www.stories.com) is similar to Pinterest, the product pictures imitate street style photography on Satorialist blogs and the label features designs which could easily walk the runway of Acne & Co. The store definitely invites you in, because the products are beautifully presented in an airy retail space. Why I tell you about “& Other Stories”? The sandals below will be seen on the new cover! How do you like them?

During our weeks working on sisterMAG and the other Carry-On Publishing project we meet many interesting people and find a lot of interesting things we would love to share with you. Thus, we will start a new blogpost series on our sisterMAG blog called “Toni’s (or Thea’s) Week”. We hope you like our little inside view into the sisterMAG world!

Monday

The week started off great with a bank holiday! Despite the gloomy weather forecast we were lucky and the sun came out in the afternoon. We used the moment and explored the surrounding of Berlin again, which is really beautiful. Former kings of Prussia built their own France / Italy in the countryside with little palaces and parks put between lakes and fields. Glienicke palace is one of them. It emulates an Italian villa with real artifacts decorating the whole building.

The nearby bridge is very famous in German history. In the middle of the bridge the border between East and West Germany (i.e. West Berlin) ran. The bridge was also the setting for various spy exchanges in the Cold War. Nowadays it’s difficult to imagine that this idyllic place was a political playground.

Tuesday

Office searching day! Yes, you heard right, we’re finally setting up office for Carry-On Publishing and its publications (sisterMAG will soon be joined by our next title “CVmag”) and we’re so much looking forward to having a space where contributors can come in for a talk or a brainstorming session, which we can decorate in a way that gives us inspiration on a daily basis.

And we were lucky! We saw a good place today and – finger’s crossed – things are looking good that we might actually get it. It’s in an old factory area with brick-stone buildings. There are many start-ups there, so very creative. More information as soon as we know for sure and we can make some photos!

Wednesday / Thursday

Catching up on work and especially eMails (but still long way to go before the eMail list is any shorter). I’m pretty excited to plan the Paketkasten test (for all English-speaking reader: the German post is beta-testing the new “parcel box” with 10 sisterMAG readers), welcoming the first testers, checking sizes and spots, brainstorming about our Paketkasten Party in August.

For all people living in Germany: We still have some spaces left. If you want to test the new DHL service for free (later the Paketkasten will cost a couple of hundred Euros to set up), just write us an eMail (mail@sister-mag.com)! More information in sisterMAG N°7.

Friday – Sunday

Finally, the weekend of The Hive was there! The conference was very different from last year’s, where we had spoken the first time to a larger audience.

What made this year special were the little moments:

• Getting to know new areas of Berlin with Judith from Joelix (http://www.joelix.com/), Elodie from Madame Love (http://madame-love.com/) and Trixie from Frau Sieben (http://www.frausieben.de/blog/) on Friday.
• Getting inspired by Tiffany’s (http://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/) presentation to really start a newsletter (let’s see how long it will take us to actually realize it ;-) )
• Spending a great Saturday evening chatting with Anne (http://anneskitchen.co.uk/), Elodie (http://madame-love.com/), Jael (http://thesweetestbrunch.com/), Juliane (http://frokenskicklig.blogspot.de/), Marisa (http://www.engelenchen.de/) and Tori on the wooden platform while watching the Champions League game.
  
  
• Walking up the stairs four stories at least 15 times and each time meeting new people.
• Welcoming new iPad-mini friends (Hello Ricarda!)
• Finally getting to know Ailine from Aicuisine (http://aicuisine.com/)
• Thea’s excitement to finally meet Dietlind Wolf

Yours, Toni