welcome to Fernweh

After over two months of fraught emails, drafting designs and panic--it's here. A website, run by six teenaged girls, which hopes to be more than just another teen magazine.

For years, I've been searching for a good magazine. One look in my room, and my search is evident! There are magazines everywhere but nothing for teenagers suited me, and although I loved what was written for twenty-somethings, I still wanted something that I could whole-heartedly relate to as a fourteen year old. Perhaps I was being picky, but the words and images that I fill my brain with are so important to me. I wanted to read magazines that meant something to me and that I could relate to and that felt like talking to your best friend.

And when I got bored of waiting for my perfect magazine to turn up, I emailed some lovely friends and we made it instead. I was itching to pour my creativity into a new project that would combine all the words I loved so dearly with the images we're passionate about. All of us, we want to make something that shares the ideas that we have, the places we've visited, and the life that we want to create for ourselves.

It's in the name really, isn't it? Fernweh. Pronounced fairn-vay, this German word translates into English as 'farsickness'. But like all good German words, it's a bit more than that. To us, it's wanting to go new places, and it's finding the joy in your hometown, and it's learning about what came before.

Fernweh is the stirring in your soul when you spin a globe and it's the longing to go somewhere new. It's dreaming that you can put together a magazine and it's the tangible product of your work. Fernweh is magic.

{Abbey's photo!}

Everyone working on Fernweh is immensely talented. Hannah, Carlotta, Katie, Kendall, and Abbey--they're all such creative, friendly, inspired people. Hannah put together our blog design; it's gorgeous! Abbey came up with the name & we're using her photo everywhere too. It's our profile picture everywhere, it's just above this paragraph, and we've plastered our manifesto across it too. And everyone has put together stunning material that we'll be sharing with you daily throughout January--recipes, an article on the colour yellow, poetry, travel dreams, and so many photographs.

I think I speak for us all, too, when I say thank you to you. Our blog readers, who have put up with us talking about some secret project which we won't tell you about, who have supported us in our own individual projects, and who, I hope, will love Fernweh as much as we do.

Welcome to Fernweh.

Stay a while, why don't you?

xx
Libby