Catch Up 3: Everything Else

So, the past two days I covered everything from the holidays that I'd missed, today, I'm just going to finish it off with everything that happened between January and May.

First up: I learned to knit!

On my way back to Ames for the Spring semester, I stopped at a Barnes & Nobel, where I found a really cheap knitting kit on clearance. I had been talking to a couple people about how I'd kind of wanted to learn, so I impulse bought it on sight.

And I made a scarf!

After I started knitting grandma found this (very) old skein of yarn in a desk and gave it to me. I took me well over an hour, maybe two, to untangle it. :p

Then I started buying more stuff and started a new scarf.

It was done in just a couple of weeks!

I was pretty happy with it!

Then I got some ring looms to help me knit hats.

These were for Shaina, and she loved them. :)

There was a flock of Canada geese on central campus one day!

They just made themselves at home.

There was a lot of melting happening, so maybe they thought it was a lake?

In late January I came home for a family get together, (where I took no pictures) but since I was going to be home, and since we'd had so much fun at the last one, and since we'd already been planning to binge watch the brand new Netflix Series of Unfortunate Events, my cousins decided to throw another themed tea party.

It was not quite as themed as before. No real decorations or costumes.

A lot of it was just stuff they wanted an excuse to make. Like more scones. :p

And eat. :p

Some of the sandwiches had mushrooms on them.

And some had horseradish.

If you've read book 11, then you know why these things are appropriate. :p

I don't think the tea was themed. I just wanted a picture of my cup. :)

Peppermint cream cheese bon bons.

Peppermint being the themed ingredient. Book 3, the Baudelaires were allergic. :)

We also had cold soup. (See book 3 again. :p)

These were basically Little Debbie cakes with gummy snakes frosting'd on.

A nod to the Incredibly Deadly Viper from book 2. (And 13!)

And that was that event. Like I said before, I didn't take any picture at the family thing I'd come home for, but Jackson was with us too, and I did get a couple pictures of him. :p

He was getting swaddled. :)

So cute! :p

The next big thing might be news to you if you haven't seen me in awhile: I got contacts!

I've had glasses since I was 6, so this is kind of a big deal.

This was a picture I took to text to Shaina when I first got them.

The next event was another trip to Minnesota. I was doing a job shadow at my cousin Kyle's workplace, and Shaina and Sasha came along for the ride so we could visit Mandi and Co. Sadly, I again neglected to take many pictures. :( I did take a bunch this one night though. :)

Trinity decided to bury Shaina alive. :p

She wanted me to document it.

Shaina found it hilarious. :)

Then Trinity decided that wasn't enough.

She wanted to model.

And then she wanted my phone. :p

And proceeded to take pictures of everyone and everything.

Most of them were of the floor and halves of faces, so I pruned before posting. :p

Mandi knows what kind of kids she's raising: Goofballs. :p

Awesome goofballs. :)

My last big event was another job shadow, and I did take a few at this one. I was applying for an internship at IPTV. (PBS) I didn't get it, but I had fun that day anyway. :)

I sat in on two episodes of Iowa Press.

In the first episode they were interviewing former governor of Iowa and former US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.

It was so interesting learning a lot of behind the scenes stuff!

They had these guys standing in the offices.

I think I remember them from PBS pledge drives when I was a kid!

And that's pretty much it. I didn't photograph much else. I am however photographing a LOT of things this summer as I am building a portfolio of my work, photography and otherwise. To do that I'm going to lots of different places and taking a ton of pictures, hoping I'll get just a few awesome ones I can show off in a portfolio. But that means I have tons of other pictures that don't quite make the cut that I can just post on my blog for fun! So stay tuned! I've got lots of stuff coming! I'll leave you with this one picture I took after I got back to Harlan this summer. :)

Digital Zoloft

This video post is going to be a bit different than my past ones, all these videos are ones that I have chosed because they just made me feel good. Whether I had a bad day and a video lifted me out of it, or it was just a video that made me smile and feel better about the world, these are all the videos I've watched recently that just made me happy.

I thought of the idea for this post the other day and I liked it so much that I decided it was worth making a logo for. I might even turn this into a series.

This first video just happened a couple days ago. I watched it, I loved it, I almost died. In a good way! This little girl is the physical incarnation of everything that is good and pure and innocent in this cold, dark, brutal world. Who knew a broken water heater could bring one so much joy?



This is a music video from the group World Order. I've liked them for years, but this video, a team-up with fellow J-Pop group SKE48, just totally brightened my who day when I watched it. It's just so infectiously upbeat!



This next video is just a clip of an adorable dog getting a new toy, but it's just so cute that I can't help but melt. It also doesn't hurt that the new toy is one one of my favorite characters from childhood. :p



Lindsey Stirling always brings a smile to my face, but this month it seems like she's been working overtime! She has put out two videos in a row that are just pure happiness.

The first one is a medley of songs from Beauty and the Beast, but the simple way that she chose to put it together, just filming herself and her crew as they set up while they were on tour, and then just completely goofed around, just set it apart. I especially love her costume choice for the end. Who else would choose a giant puffy teapot costume over Belle's iconic yellow ballgown? It was just too brilliant. :p



The second video made me smile just because of how brilliantly silly it is. For years Lindsey has played this weird character named Phelba on her second channel. Phelba is supposed to be the lead Stirlingite, Lindsey's biggest fan who is completely obsessed with her. She's always just been something she did for fun, like in vlogs and goofy videos, nothing serious, but in this video, her oddball alter ego makes her music video debut, and I loved every second of it.

I also loved that Lindsey chose to include four of her best friends in the video including a few other people from YouTube that I enjoy watching. I'm not that familiar with Blogilates, but I do watch Lilly Singh from time to time, and I my cousins and I usually end up binge watching iJustine and Rosanna Pansino videos every time we get together. It was just a lot of fun to see them all make cameo appearances. :)



This next video I'm sure you've seen, I shared on Facebook the day after it hit the internet, and it absolutely blew up. I know it sounds like I'm a hipster, but I am proud to say I say it when it only had a few thousand views and I said that it was going to go viral. I was so completely right. The video currently has over 23 million views, and these interrupting kids, their deadpan dad, and their frantic mother are pretty much internet sensations at this point.



Lastly we have a couple of videos from Cookie Monster and friends. They've been making a few appearances around the internet lately, and these videos were just so hilarious. Especially Cookie Monster. I loved how upset he got when people kept asking the dreaded "Veggie Monster" question.





I really enjoyed putting this post together, it even inspired a spin off post that I will publish tomorrow, so be on the lookout for that. Digital Zoloft will not replace my Internet Awesome posts, but I think I will bring it back occasionally, especially if I suddenly collect a whole bunch of videos that made me really happy like I did this month. :)

College Collages

Well, yesterday we got our collages back from our design 1 class, so I thought I’d share them with you. This has been a multi-step process in learning about collages, so I’ll start off with the “Sketches” The main purpose of the collage exercise was to teach about perspective. The sketches we made first to demonstrate that we knew how you use the illusion of perspective correctly. This was kind of a no-brainer for me, but I suppose that it was helpful for some people.




The last one was a bit of a mistake, It was supposed to show linear perspective, but I misunderstood, so while it does show forms appearing to be going further away from each other, it doesn’t have them all lined up in a row converging to a point and disappearing into the distance.
And now what you’ve all been waiting for: The final projects!
The first one was supposed to show something real, something that looks like you could reach into the picture. I went in kind of my own direction with that, and made an object. It was technically what the project called for, but probably not what the teacher had in mind, still, he has told me that even if I don’t end up with exactly what the project is calling for, if he can see that I understand the concepts, but am unwilling to sacrifice the artwork for the exact specifications of the project, any points I might lose for that will be made up by the quality of the artwork. So even though this isn’t something that looks like an actual place, it was still a quality piece. I chose to make mine a fishbowl.

I put my folder in the scanner on top of it, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to tell that I actually made the bowl itself. Most people just used a square paper for their projects, but the ones that everyone picked out as being the best were ones that people had gone in a different direction with, and done something way different.
My other one was for the “Ambiguous collage” It was supposed to be representative of something unrealistic. I ended up giving myself a headache with this, because I did something that ended up a lot harder than I thought it would. I made a bird, out of birds. I thought it would be easy, but when I started gluing it together I realized I was wrong. It ended up taking probably three hours to finish, and that was only the gluing together. That’s not counting all the time it took to find all the pictures and cut them out, but I am pretty happy with the piece. On the day we turned them in, mine was one of only five chosen by the entire class as being the best, and it was one of two that got multiple votes.

Sorry about the missing wing and tail tips, the scanner isn’t quite big enough.
So now that that project is complete we have started on our next one. This one I am not liking quite as much, but if it turns out good, by the end I think I will enjoy it a lot. We are working on making kites. The reason I am not really enjoying it is because I really know nothing about making kites. But that is the point of the exercise. He is not giving us anything to start with. We have to do all the research ourselves and build a working model. I’m afraid I’m going to put a ton of money and effort into this project and then have it fall out of the sky and smash. Thank goodness that Charlie Brown’s “Kite Eating Trees” aren’t real or I’d probably be scared of them too. In my research I have discovered something called Kite Arial Photography, where you attach a camera to a special kite and then use a remote to take pictures from the sky. I would love to be able to do that, but I’d be even more terrified of sending my kite up if I had a $500 camera attached. I’m still not sure what I am going to do. I really want to make an amazing kite, but if I try to do something too ambitious, it’ll be the bird collage all over, but instead of taking three hours, it’ll be impossible to finish. I’m thinking I should stick to something safe, but I still have that voice in the back of my head that says “Go for the ambitious project!” I always have high ambitions, but I end off biting off more than I can chew. I need to learn to scale back my ideas to something I know I can manage, and save the high concept ideas for when I’ve had experience with something easier.
Well, that’s what’s going on in my Design 1 class. I have some other stuff to share about my other classes, but I’m going to save that for later. I have some more research to do tonight on my kite project, and I probably should start getting ready for bed soon.