Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The month of December was crazy! I failed to post for two weeks! Sorry!
Nate and I traveled to NYC for a few days and then to Costa Rica for a week! We had a great time and saw lots of natural and cultural highlights.

This one is called: "Ox next to an ox cart!"

We went zipling! This is Nate ziplining like superman! Ziplining was his favorite part of the week!

We learned how to make coffee and chocolate! 

Nate got to hold a Toucan! This was his main goal for most of the week! He was so happy!

We went to a Costa Rican cultural show. It was interesting. Here are the fireworks and "dancing" at the end. 

We went on several boat rides to see animals in the wild. This is a panoramic of a boat ride next to the Pacific Ocean. During this boat rides we saw 36 differenct species of birds (we had a handout!) and lots of crocodiles!

We went to a waterfall park. This is us under/next to one of the waterfalls!  

And since we now have front facing cameras, we took lots of pictures! Here are some!

I hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas! Happy new year! See you in 2013!

Felt Ornaments

Last night, my brother and his housemates had a party. One of his housemates (Cesar) and I decided to get together and have craft time to make some decorations for this party. I suggested felt ornaments because I think they are so fun to make and pretty simple. Unfortunately, we did not end up making as many as we were anticipating (we each got like 10-15 pieces of felt!).

All of our supplies and Cesar cutting out circles

I picked four types of felt ornaments that I felt had good variety and still were straight-forward. I printed out instructions so we could easily reference the directions. I had fun, but Cesar felt like he was working in a sweat shop (he wanted me to mention this here). I guess these felt ornaments were a tiny bit on the tedious side and do require some sewing skills. It would have helped him to have youtube videos rather than printed out instructions. 

Since I am a nerd, I decided to rate these on three categories: difficulty, time, and wow-factor (1 to 5 with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest). 

1. Simple Ball Ornament

credit to the Purl Bee; difficulty: 3, time: 2, wow-factor: 2

This one took a minute to wrap my head around, but once I got what was happening (this is one where a video might have helped), it went quite fast. I attached a star to the bottom to add some sparkle! I had plans to make these as ovals, stars, etc. which would make them a little more interesting. 

2. Intricate Ball Ornament
credit to Zakka Life: difficulty: 2, time: 4, wow-factor: 4

I really, really liked how this turned out. Since I only bought silver embroidery thread, the stitches were in stark contrast to the felt and made it look even more interesting. This also could look pretty cool if ovals were used instead of circles. I added a silver puff ball to the string for added cuteness.

3. Ogee Ornament
credit to betz white; difficulty 1, time: 1, wow-factor: 3.5

I made this before with a tiny bit of felt. This turned out really well. Theoretically, it would look even better with stiffer felt. This is an ornament where the silver stiches detract rather than enhance, so it would have been better if I used green embroidery thread for this. Overall, from cutting to finishing, this took me maybe two and half minutes.

4. Random Funnel Ball Ornament

credit to How About Orange; difficulty: 3, time: 2, wow-factor 2.5

I wanted to make the funnels, but then I ended up folding my circles more and just made lots of creases and put them together. This took a bit of finagling to look good, but as I added more parts, it shaped up to look like a ball. I meant for the red and green to be distributed more around the ball, but they ended up bunching a bit.

In the end, we put up the four ornaments (Cesar only had a chance to finish 1/2 an ornament) on either side of the walkway between the hallway and the living room. We also go some non-Christmas color felt to make some to put up year round! So easy and fun!

Christmas Tree Up!

I have not put up a Christmas tree in my apartment ever, but Nate wanted one so we went to Target and got a fake Christmas tree and some decorations. We got one that pops up and is made of tinsel but it fits great.

I added lights and then ornaments! I like how the lights reflected off the hardwood floor. 

The ornaments were all different and the star was nice and simple! Because the tree was just a circle of tinsel wrapped around a pole, I could tie all the ornaments into the tinsel and make them stay on (forever!).

Some details of the star, lights, and ornaments. 

I also added decorative touches to a bunch of items in the room. 

Aren't these pictures so much better? What a difference flash and the iPhone5 makes! I tried to take a few panorama pictures of the full room and this one came out the best: 

I like the halo of light coming from the Christmas tree!

Nate made the meme above because of all of my panorama pictures (I tried some of the tree, too, which turned out ridiculous!!). 

Hopefully, now that our apartment is all decked out, I will make some Christmas-y crafts. I need to figure out exactly what I want to make!

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!!

Failed Skirt & Corn Maze

This weekend, I had two failed adventures. First, this Saturday, we went to the Davis Corn Maze. There were a few reasons we went there rather than other mazes in the area. First off, we had discounted tickets through MIT (only a few bucks off, but still helps). Second off, it was advertised as the largest, most intense maze in New England. And, boy, did it not disappoint. I have to say as a neurotic "completer" of things, I do not enjoy not thoroughly and wholly finishing things. Let's say that somehow we missed one of each of the rubbings, riddles, and QRC codes (although we somehow found all three geocaches without actually doing the geocaching), and I was a bit annoyed.

Laura, Boris, Olga, and Nate at the beginning and on a bridge within the maze.

We did spend a quality three full hours (they had time stamps on our booklets so this is not an exaggeration!) in the maze (the first time, just exploring, and the second time using the trusty "right-hand-rule"). In the end, we had tons of fun, but I would have wanted to do it once more and attempted to find EVERYTHING in the maze. There were quick and fun activities throughout the maze (pseudo catapulting, pseudo ring throwing, pseudo ziplining, pseudo sumo wrestling, etc.) and when Olga and I went to "sumo wrestle," I ended up tripping and falling and not being able to get up. It was HILARIOUS.

In the second picture, my feet are in the air and everyone is laughing uncontrollably!

My second failed adventure of the weekend was my double sided skirt. I started off so strong! The fabric is adorable -- the stars on the black side glow in the dark!!! However, I miscalculated my seams and the width of the waist elastic so it ended up a bit too tight at the hips. Also, it was not completely reversible. I also attempted to make some pockets that did not make it into the skirt because of their lack of reversibility. Anyway, it was an utter failure. It's still wearable but I am disappointed at my lack of getting it right. If I have enough time this week, I will attempt to get a bit more fabric (it's only a few dollars) and try again, knowing what I know now. I know why I messed up the reversibility and hopefully, I will even be able to put in the pockets correctly!

I'm holding up the tights I got to wear under the skirt in the bottom left picture. The way I flipped over the other side on that picture makes the pattern go upside down! Arg!

Curtains for Boris & Laura

Last weekend, I made some curtains for Laura and Boris's apartment. Laura and I went to a fabric store (Sewfisticated) to get the fabric. Laura wanted this grey jersey fabric with a black ribbon lengthwise through the curtain. I took the measurements she gave me and put together a sketch.

As the sketch above shows, I hemmed the sides first, then the bottom, and then folded over about 4 1/2-4 3/4 inches on the top, pinned 15 inches from bottom, and sewed across so I was sewing 4 1/4 inches from the top and 14 3/4 inches from the bottom. I sewed again about 2 inches from the top (so that the top would have ruffle and so that there was a designated 2 1/2 inches for the curtain rod). Finally, I attached the ribbon by first pinning it 3 3/4 inches from the bottom and then sewing both sides 1/4 inches from each side.  

When both curtains were done, I went over to Boris and Laura's and Boris installed the curtain rods. The final product looked fine overall, but since the fabric was a bit on the heavy side, my two inches of ruffles kind of went limp. I should've done a bit less and it would have been a bit more ruffly on top. 

I am thinking of making some curtains for our bedroom because the ones we have are not sufficient and we have four windows in our bedroom so it gets cold very easily. 

I did not do any crafts or home improvement projects this weekend. On Saturday, my parents were in town for a day long layover, and today we went to deCordova Museum & Sculpture Park. Nate was unsure of it going in and left feeling "meh" about it, but I thought it was AWESOME. I highly recommend it to people who like sculptures and/or just pretty places to walk around and see art. 

While at the fabric store, I got some halloween fabric and will attempt to make a two-sided skirt next weekend! It should be awesome!