The correct way to spend a snow day!

I just found this post that I had forgotten to publish, so I though I would do that now!
In the 12 years (plus 1 for kindergarten) I have been in the public school system, I have experienced three snow days. The third one occurred last week (well, because I'm posting this today, it was actually more like a few months ago). The first one in 5 years! Since I am a senior in highs chool, this will be my last snow day, so I made the most of it.

My siblings and I suited up in our snow gear and went outside. Since the weather had been relatively warm recently, the snow was wet, perfect for building snowmen, and even igloos! Now, I had never built an igloo before, but I understood the basic concept. Traditionally, or at least on tv, an igloo is built with little snow cubes. We do have some of those molds but that would have taken forever. When the snow is wet, you really only have 1 day to work, because it gets cold over night and then the wet snow freezes making it useless for building.  So instead of making hundreds of small cubes, I thought it would be easier to make it out of giant snow balls that get smaller and smaller as the igloo gets taller and taller. This was a much more efficient way to make a fairly decent igloo (although it did end up a bit lumpy if you look at the pictures below).
To start my sister and I  rolled the largest snow balls we could and placed them in a ring. Then we started making snow balls that were small enough for us to lift so that we could make another row on top of the first ring. We slowly shrank the ring so that eventually, it would become just a single ball as the roof.
Overall, I think we were very successful. It may not be the prettiest igloo, but my brother though it was awesome, and it was tall enough for one person to stand in at a time. Here are all of the pictures I took. (If you haven't noticed yet, I really enjoy taking tons of pictures!)

the Front

one side

another side

the inside

Looking up at the ceiling, although its really hard to perceive depth in this picture

 

Me (left) and my sister

Me and my sister when we are actually looking at the camera

My sister and I again 

My sister and my dad, no more explanation needed :P

Music for Seniors by Seniors

At our high school, participation in NHS requires a senior leadership project. My friend and I wanted to do our project together, and since we are both in orchestra, we decided to help out in the community by providing entertainment for senior citizens at nursing homes. We played for about 2 hours at 2 different nursing homes in our local area. We both played our violins for most of the time, but we had a few of our friends come and play too. Here are some photo's of us (I only have photos from the first nursing home we played at. My friend didn't realize that she had to be out of town for the second one so I played by myself at the second one, and its pretty hard to take pictures while playing the violin :P ). 

My friend Lesley(on left) and I

My and my quartet from school
we played "the bird" by Handel

Lesley playing with our friend Sarah

Me playing violin

Me playing piano (WAY in the back!)

We had a lot of fun. At first, it is a bit frightening to have to stand up in front of so many people to play, but I was able to relax a little when I saw that they still enjoyed the music even if I made a mistake once in a while. They really appreciated us playing there, and hopefully we can do this again in the summer. 

Christmas Crafts

This year I participated in two secret Santa gift exchanges: one with a small group of my of friends and one with my orchestra. Coincidentally, I got the same person, my friend Sarah, for both! With 6 people in my group of friends, and 30 people in my orchestra (not including me) the probability of getting Sarah for both is 1/180. (Did I do that right? I think I did). I was extremely happy about this. Since I know Sarah so well, it was easy to think of creative gifts to give her. She loves "Doctor Who" and "Harry Potter", so obviously, this was a good place to start. One day, while surfing on the web, I found this website called pintrest. Apparently its a pretty popular website, although I seemed to have missed the memo. Anyway, I found some pretty cool crafts that people had made. One of them was a Harry Potter light switch plate that labeled "On" as "Lumos" and "Off" as "Nox". Another was a stuffed Adipose (the alien made of fat from Doctor Who).
Both seemed like pretty reasonable crafts. The adipose could be crocheted, and the light switch could be painted. With only a few weeks until Christmas, I got straight to work.

The Adipose:
I just felt like making the adipose first, so I decided I would give Sarah that for the Orchestra Secret Santa because that was coming up first. I searched online for some basic starting ideas. The best looking ones were sewn from fabric and sold on the BBC shop, but I don't know how to use a sewing machine, and I didn't want to buy it. The rest of them were homemade, either crocheted or knitted. But honestly, most of the homemade ones weren't very good. The only really good one I found was knitted, but knitting is harder to form shapes with, and it takes a lot longer. So I gave up my search and decided to just start crocheting and hope that mine turned out better than what I saw online. I was pretty excited about this, and when I get excited about a project, I have a hard time focusing on other things. So instead of waiting for the weekend, I ran out at 8pm on a school night to Michael's craft store to buy some white yarn. From 8pm until 3am I did my homework for 15 minutes, stopped, crocheted for 30 minutes, sighed (realizing that I really should do some of my homework), did another 15 min of homework, and so on. By 3, I had all of the pieces crocheted and I finished it up the next day.

Here is how I did it. Since an adipose is really just a blob with hands and feet, I started by crocheting a  cylinder shape with arms. Its just like sewing a mitten but with two thumbs instead of one. Once I had that sewn, I used some black yarn to sew on his face. Surprisingly, that took almost 20 minutes because I wanted to try and capture the expression from the actual character. It isn't perfect, but at least it looks happy.
















The next step was to sew his legs and the top of his head. His head was easy; I just crocheted a square. His feet were a little more challenging however. I crocheted a square just like the head, but halfway through the square, I left two holes for the feet. If you are familiar with crochet, I chained 5 or 6 stitches a quarter of the way through he row and then started my regular crochet after skipping 3 or 4 points on the row before. Then I did the same thing three quarters of the way down for the second foot. Sorry if that didn't make sense. I'm not really familiar with crochet terminology, I just know how to do it. If you are really interested in making this, send me an email, and I will look up the terms and some video, or take more detailed pictures of the process and send you better instructions.

After all of the pieces were crocheted, I needed to sew them together. I just used the same white yarn, and a giant plastic needle that fits the yarn. It took a while to get it centered, but it fit together fairly well. After I had the legs sewed on, I stuffed it with some polyester fluff I found in the closet. Then I sewed on his head.

Here is the Adipose fully stuffed and a picture of my friend with it after I gave it to her! I think she really liked it!
























The Harry Potter Light Switch:
I actually made the the light switch plate after Christmas. Since some of us were out of town, that was the only time we could meet to exchange gifts. I started by looking online to see what other had done. Some of the best I found were on this blog. I used these as inspiration for mine.


Supplies:

1. Wood light switch plate (got mine at Lowes) $5 (I bought two just in case I messed up, which of course I did)
2. Acrylic paint (got mine at Michael's) $1/bottle

The hardest part of this was probably deciding on colors. I drew it first in windows paint and tried about 10 different colors. In the end, I decided to go with the Gryffindor red and black. For the words, I downloaded the Harry Potter font from here and printed out "Lumos" and "Nox" to use as a reference when I wrote it out. It took about an hour to paint and about 5 minutes to dry (with the help of a blow dryer). Here it is!

Wait! Hold on, just had a blast of inspiration. New light switch idea. For all those doctor who fans out there, go back to the episode called "Silence in the Library". Remember when Dave died and he kept repeating "Hey, who turned out all the lights?" How cool would that be on a light switch plate! And do you remember the green bar on all of the suits (I think it showed the battery level. see below)? That could be centered on the actual light switch so that the switch was part of it. I did a quick sketch on paint.

TARDIS Ornaments:
This next Christmas Craft is not actually mine; it's my Mom's. Although my Mom thinks Doctor Who is quite ridiculous, she knows how much my siblings and I like it, and she has come to accept it (although she still refuses to watch it!). So this Christmas my mom made each of us a TARDIS ornament using cross stitch. She has been doing cross stitch for years and it's amazing what she can do with it. THANKS MOM!! This is a lot more complex than my crafts, and I do not have any tips for making these (although if you would like instructions or help, I'm sure my mom drew out a pattern somewhere that I could put up upon request).

Star Wars Stop Motion

Two weeks ago, I babysat the two boys next door. It is always challenging to keep kids entertained, so I decided to try something new. I brought some clay and a camera for a claymation, but since they are still in elementary school, they had a hard time working with the clay and got bored. My genius idea had failed....or did it? We stopped and ate dinner. While we ate, we started talking about Star wars and I showed them the soundtracks I had. Then I had a spur of inspiration. I had seen a light saber in the basement; we could make a star wars stopmotion. They jumped up in excitement and ran to their closets. One had been Darth Vader and the other had been a storm trooper for Halloween. Once they had their costumes, I had them decide what they wanted the story to be. To no surprise, they chose to have a battle between Darth Vader and the Storm Trooper. We did a quick walk through and began shooting. They were surprisingly focused and patient. They knew just how much to move for each photo, and they were good at getting back to the same spot when they stopped to review the photos. Overall, it only took about an hour to film! It consists of about 70 photos, and itt's pretty awesome.

Music Video

Hey everyone,
I finally finished the TARDIS Tree house music video! After a lot of deliberation, I chose the song "Onwards!" from the season 5 soundtrack. Although the tree house was based on the 10th Doctor's (David Tennant) TARDIS, the soundtrack from season 5 is lighter and faster paced, which I feel fits better with the video. I hope you enjoy it!

Sorry for taking so long to post this. I realize I haven't posted in about 5 months, but as a senior in high school, I am busier than Hermione in the Prisoner of Azkaban...I also spent too much of my free time fueling my TV addiction by watching Sherlock and Battlestar Galactica. I will posting more later tonight so check back in.

Fun Cakes

Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with baking cakes in different shapes. It began with a lightning bolt cake for the harry potter and the deathly hallows part 2 premier. After doing a bit of research online, I found out that you can either make a cake mold out of tin foil or you can use a regular or circular pan (which you can find at any store) and cut away from a larger cake to get the shape you want.

For the lightning bolt, I decided it would be easiest to just make a mold, because cutting it out of a rectangle would be a nightmare. To begin I googled harry potter lightning bolt and I decided that this one was the best for a cake. Once I had the image, I drew it onto a large sheet of tin foil. We were originally going to put the tin foil around a card stock lightning bolt base. but then decided better against putting paper in the oven...

The next step is where it gets tricky. To make the walls of the mold you have to fold the tinfoil up around the traced lightning bolt. Because one sheet isn't going to be enough you have to tear off more smaller sheets and continue to add them to the sides and bottom to make a stable mold. You have to be patient for this part. Tin foil doesn't stick to itself like plastic wrap so you need to pinch it together and do a lot of folding over to make it keep its shape. Tin foil also rips very easily so be careful when picking up or bending the mold. If it does rip, just tear off another piece of tin foil and patch the rip or the hole. Continue to add reinforcement to the sides and bottom until  it feels sturdy enough not to fall apart when you put in the batter.

When you are satisfied with the mold, grease it and put it on a cookie sheet. Putting it on a cookie sheet will make the mold easier to take in and out of the oven, and if it does fall apart, the batter won't get all over the oven. Use the directions on the back of the box for estimating temperature and baking time.
When the cake is done, you can just tear the mold away from the cake. (I forgot to take photo's of the cake after we iced it. We gave it to our neighbors for their harry potter party).

A week later, my friends and I were bored so we decided to make a pokeball cake. We used the easier method to make this cake because a pokeball is just a circle. For this cake we just used a 9 inch cake pan. For the colors we bought vanilla icing and used food coloring to dye it. (There wasn't a black so we just mixed all the colors to create a brown for the middle stripe)

And finally for my friends birthday i baked a TARDIS cake (she is also a huge doctor who fan). I used a 9x13 rectangular pan and cut out cake to make the light on top. The most difficult part was doing the icing. I put vanilla icing in quart sized ziplock baggies, added the appropriate amount of food coloring, and then cut a small hole in a corner so I could squeeze the icing out in a thin line.

Also, When you pour the batter into the pan, make sure you spread it out evenly!!!! I didn't do that great of a job at spreading the batter, as you can see from the picture on the right :P The TADIS is a little swollen...

TARDIS tree house music video

Hey,
I'm putting together a slideshow of even more photo's from the week of building the TARDIS, and I was trying to pick out some of the best Dr. Who songs to play behind it. If anyone has any suggestions of their favorite Dr. Who songs, please post them in the comments! Thanks!