Happy Thanksgiving!

Unfortunately, I have been really quiet on crafts and home improvements. It may have something to do with the fact that I've been writing over a hundred thank you cards and just trying to keep up with lab stuff. I will definitely have some projects up here before Christmas.

The one exciting thing I have to report is that both Nate and I got iPhone5s! The iPhone5 is such an improvement over the iPhone3GS (which we both had). My pictures will be much brighter and less grainy and I think that will be improvement for all. Plus, I have been FaceTiming everyone who can put up with me and having Siri write out all my text messages. Oh technology!

Also, in the home improvement front, we will be getting new windows in the next week or two, so that should be awesome! Our windows are horrendous and since our bedroom has four windows, having better windows will improve our lives tremendously! With the new windows, I am hoping to put up and/or make new curtains, so we'll see how that goes!

Hope everyone had a relaxing and wonderful Thanksgiving break! 

Happy Halloween!

I did end up redoing the skirt and making it reversible with pockets. I cut out two rectangles the same size and put them each together into a circle to make two identical skirts. The pockets went into the seam of the orange side, but sewing them into the seam was surprisingly hard to wrap my head around. Once the two skirts were sewn (with the pockets on the orange side!), I could go on to joining the two skirts together to make it reversible.

For the joining, I first did it correctly on the bottom, but then I decided to do it the same way on the top and I didn't realize that this would make it so that I couldn't turn it inside out completely (it was sort of a mobious strip). Oops! I did get these fun pictures of Nate using the skirt as a bandana. 

I took out my failed top and ironed it and redid it (very neatly) from the outside and everything worked out. I then made a place for the elastic and put it in. I realized that it would get bunched up if I didn't sew the elastic in, so I went through and sewed the elastic in once around the diameter of the skirt. Overall, I was happy with how it turned out, but it was a little bit on the large side, so I should have made it a bit smaller (maybe 1.5x my hips measurement would have been better than 2x my hips measurement). If I averaged this skirt and the skirt I made last week, it would have been perfect. Unfortunately, you can't average real objects (kind of like how you can't CTRL+Z real life). Also, when I went to the fabric store, they didn't have the glow-in-the-dark fabric, so I got a dark fabric with purple words and used what I had of the glow-in-the-dark fabric for the pockets. Yay pockets!

I wore the skirt on last Friday when we had our department halloween party with some striped black and purple tights and then again on Halloween with just some grey tights. I was debating on wearing the less bright side of the skirt seeing as I was in a visiting lab, but I decided against it because the orange side is just so much fun! These pictures were taken neither of these times, but here it is being worn by me!

Also, in the spirit of Halloween, I carved a pumpkin this week. There was an organized pumpkin carving at the university that I'm visiting. It was a lot harder to carve than I thought! The tools we had were a bit primitive so it made it hard to work with. My pumpkin is the first one in the picture below (super generic, but oh well!) and there are some better ones that others made. 

I hope everyone had a wonderful halloween!!