Folding Origami Flowers for My Wedding

Well, actually Josh has been doing most of the folding for me. I just glue and assemble them. It's some pretty good teamwork.

Bucket full of paper flowers

So I decided to write an article about it "How to Fold Easy Origami Flowers." Yeah, it's pretty cool. So if you want to learn how to make these you can find that there.

Or if folding 1000 Paper Cranes is more your style I have an article on that too.

1000 Paper Cranes

I'm making 1000 paper cranes for my wedding. I've always been obsessed with origami and I can fold cranes like nobody's business. So I thought it would be no big deal to make 1000 of them.

1000 is a lot of cranes. I thought this was going to be easy but it is taking forever. Ugh. I fold them while I'm watching TV so I can get 30-50 done in a sitting. (Of course I'm watching several hours of TV at a sitting so consider that how you will.)

I'm half done right now though and I figured I would write an article about it over on my Hubpages account if you feel like checking that out. How to Fold 1000 Paper Cranes.

So many paper cranes. This is only 500. I'm only halfway done.

Sewing Projects and Doctor Who

McCall's `M6800 Jacket Pattern

I keep meaning to make myself a new winter jacket. I finally found a style I liked and bought the pattern on the internet.

Then I bought some dark blue corduroy and held onto it for this entire last year. (It was supposed to be made for last winter.) I knew I wanted to make a TARDIS jacket but I was having a hard time figuring out what to use as the liner material. I wanted to get fabric with the police box sign printed on it but that would be very expensive and I didn't really want a white lining in my jacket anyway. So I waited. Finally I decided I should start working on it and since there is a Hancock Fabrics in Duluth I went to search for fabric. I took my sister Abbey with me and she found the perfect fabric.

It was kind of funny because when we took it to get cut the lady asked me what I was making. I told her it was the liner for a jacket and she immediately asked if it was a Doctor Who jacket. I told her it was and she got all excited. She said she gets worried when normal people buy it because it looks pretty timey-wimey and people will think of Doctor Who when they see it.

Timey-wimey Doctor Who Fabric

So I got the pattern all cut out and I decided to start with the liner because I was just so excited to get started. I got all the liner pieces cut out and labeled and all that. Then I went to start cutting the blue corduroy and I realize that it is not as wide as the pattern expects it to be, and because of this I do not have enough. So I'm laying it out every which way and no matter what it's not going to work.

Not enough fabric. :(

Today I went all around town looking for a replacement fabric and I didn't find anything I liked. I found something kind of close at Hancock Fabrics. It was still a blue corduroy but it was not as thick as the one I had. So looks like I'm waiting again until I find what I want.

I will probably still make a jacket with what I have but it will have to be a shorter version of the jacket. I just wanted a long one to use with that liner fabric because it's so pretty and it's already cut out and that would be a huge waste of perfectly good fabric.

I'm going to look through what I have in my stash and see if I can find something that will make a good liner for the smaller jacket.

The Pintester Movement

I follow Sonja Foust over at Pintester.com she tests Pinterest pins and then posts about them. Some of them work and some of them don't. She started this thing called "The Pintester Movement." She's trying to get other people to actually do Pinterest pins instead of just looking at them.

Last week I was helping my friend Sam make curtains for her new apartment. Then her boyfriend had to go to work so we put that project on hold. We needed him to draw out some of the patterns we're going to put on the curtain.

We were looking through Pinterest trying to figure out something to do and maybe think of something to make for the Pinterest Movement. She's been wanting to make nerdy stuff with Perler beads for a while now so we went to Walmart and picked some up.

While we were at Walmart I remembered another project I saw on Pinterest that I've been wanting to do. I've been wanting to make a dress form from duct tape. So we threw some duct tape in the cart.

As we went through the food section to get some parchment paper to use with our Perler beads. We decided we should come up with something to eat. Sam pulled out her phone and we looked through her food pin board. We decided on baked potatoes and a fruit salad.

The dress form tutorial came from Natasha over at  Little Pink Monster.

DIY Dress Form from Little Pink Monster

Duct Tape Dress form on Sam. 

The instructions were pretty easy to follow and it turned out pretty well. We don't have newspapers so we didn't have anything to stuff it with so it's probably going to sit around until we can find enough stuff to fill it with.

Dress Form. Yay. 

Just sort of flat until we can find stuff to fill it.

Then we were tired of the dress form so we decided to wait on making mine and decided to make the fruit salad. It came from Food.com. We decided against pineapple, bananas, and blueberries and added in apples and mango. I also drained the can of peaches we used so our "sauce" was a little thicker. It was super delicious though and I will definitely make it again.

My Fruit Salad

Fruit Salad from Food.com

The perler beads weren't from anything in particular. We've seen people selling them at anime conventions and those were amazing. They're also practically everywhere on the internet. We made a snap decision to order a bunch of beads on amazon as well as some larger peg holders so we can make things that are larger than a 15x15 square. I've spent the last week sorting beads and making things. 

Making nerdy things with Perler beads.

Perler bead Pokeball. 

Pegboards and new beads!!

Floppy disc keychain my friend Em made.

Mushroom.

Masterball and Pokeball.

Tardis from Doctor Who.

Gir.

We also made baked potatoes to share with our boyfriends and my other roommate. He ended up eating pizza though. The recipe for these came from Sea Salt With Food. I forgot to photograph them in a pretty way so you just get an image of them upside down in tinfoil boats. I was really scared they were going to make a huge mess with the butter and oil so I put them in tinfoil. They were AMAZING. Definitely using this method instead of the normal baked potato method. 

It was a very successful day.

Potatoes

Hasselback potatoes from seasaltwithfood.com

Curtains

Today is my first Monday as a graduate. That's right. I finally manged to graduate from college. It took five years but I managed it. I now have a degree in Creative Writing. Yay! It's now summer and that means it's time for summer projects. It's nice to do things without feeling guilty about avoiding homework. This also means there should be a lot more blog posts.

Curtains!! So these are some curtains I made a while back. I'm pretty proud of them. It was just some cheap fabric I found, hemmed the edges and made a tube along the top  for my tension rod that is actually meant for shower curtains. It works pretty well if we can get it wedged in the window properly (that's why it's crooked).

But now that it's summer it's also time for the box fans to be a permanent fixture in our living room window, which doesn't work well with curtains. I had an easy solution. I would just cut a panel that would allow me to flip up the part that would normally be in front of the fan.

I also bought some sheer white fabric to put behind the curtain to allow the light in but to keep people from looking into our apartment (the window sits at ground level right next to the front door of the building). I doubled it over and used some sticky backed velcro attached to the fabric and the window frame.

Appa Pillowpet and a Minecraft Mooshroom

I'm the only one of my friends who owns a sewing machine. So when they come up with gift ideas they always ask for my help. My friend Vogie came to me with a Christmas present request for his girlfriend. He's like a brother to me so I was more than happy to help him out. They are both huge fans of the video game Minecraft. It's pixel based and has that classic sort of video game look even though it's quite new.

There are apparently animals called Mooshrooms. I guess a cow with mushrooms growing out of it's head. He wanted to gift her the severed head of a Mooshroom and he wanted it to be a sixteen inch cube.

Vogie is a pretty skilled artist so he drew out a pattern for me. It was pretty easy since it's a cube with squares on. Thank god for pixel art. We were able to find the fleece we needed at Walmart and we even found some variegated red that looks exactly like in the game. I sewed all of the white black and gray squares onto my red squares and then sewed it all into a cube and filled it with a bag and a half of fluff.

This is a Mooshroom head pillow sitting on top of a very tiny freezer.

This is a picture of a very happy Sam (Vogie's girlfriend) that I stole
off of her facebook... I hope she doesn't get mad at me. 

It turned out very well and I'm very proud of it. If I were to make another one I would do it quilt style and make single squares and sew those all together.

My next project is at the request of my friend Mariah for her boyfriend Jon. She found an Appa pillow pet tutorial on pinterest and wanted to try it out. Appa is a flying bison from the show Avatar the Last Airbender. It was a little hard to follow because the instructions weren't that clear. I did my best. The face was a little off but it made it special. They were both very happy with the end result.

Appa Pillow Pet. "I'm flying!"

And again from the side. 

And again from the other side. 

Isn't that face just adorable.

I unfortunately do not have any pictures of Jon enthusiastically hugging it. But that's okay.