Giveaway!

Rocks in my dryer is hosting a giveaway carnival this week and I'm jumping on the bandwagon with my first giveaway!

So here is what I'm giving away...
















It's a handmade zippered bag that is approx. 5.5" X 4", the perfect size for a flip phone, a lipstick, or for a change purse. The outside has cute jungle animals fabric and the inside has brown and orange bear fabric.

So leave a comment telling what you would put in your little zipper bag for a chance to win. A winner will be choosen this weekend.

*open to U.S. residents only, sorry*

The differences...

...between tap dancing and marching band.

I have spent the last 9 years in marching band, so the methods have become habit. I started tap dancing all of 3 weeks ago and have begun to realize how different it is then what I'm used to.

Case #1
In marching band the rule is KEEP YOUR TOES UP!!* You must always put your heels down first and roll your feet. In tap dance you must KEEP YOUR HEELS OFF THE GROUND!!* You only put the toes down if you have a reason to make the tap noise. I'm having to now adjust to using a whole other part of my feet :/

*If you do these wrong then you will get it yelled at you. :)

Case #2
In marching band you always, Always, ALWAYS start on the left foot. With tap dance it doesn't matter. Starting on your right or left foot is determined on which side of the group you're standing on.

Gosh, all the techniques I've used for the last 9 years out the window...oh well, I finished up my last semester of marching band in the Fall and I'm having a blast with tapping! BTW I got my new tap shoes in the mail yesterday and they are so beautiful!




<- That's what my shoes look like and no, those aren't my legs :(

I have no good title...

I recently wrote a post for my dad's blog about my favorite place in the world. Check it out and read it here.

Current read: Pride and Prejudice


And I still need help...read post below.

I need your help!

Here's the deal, I've decided to write a book. What, you might ask is my inspiration...

I was walking to class on Friday when I overheard a guy saying "I feel like Bob Marley in it." I just had to look back and see why the guy felt like Bob Marley. He was wearing a black and orange stripped stocking cap which he must have thought looked like the classic Bob Marley hat.

On the rest of the way to class I thought about what the guy had said and about some of the other crazy, random things I've heard around campus. I decided to start writing them down as I hear them and see if I get enough for a book.

So here's where you come in...I want to have a title thought up so if/when I talk to people about it I will have a good name to tell them. Here's some of the title options I've come up with. Please tell me what you think and/or suggest new ones because I don't think mine are very good. So now it's up to you :)

Title Options So Far:
Things I Overheard on Campus
Snippets Heard on Campus
Campus Talk: Sayings One Student Overheard
The Word Around Campus
"I Feel Like Bob Marley in it" - and other things I heard on campus

(Like I said, they're a little lame)

<--a picture of my lovely university campus...which I took :)

Flashback Friday...4

This week is a themed Flashback Friday. That theme is...a t-shirt and large cats.

The t-shirt I'm referring to is from 1st grade. It says my school's name and "where learning is fun," which I'm not so sure it's true, but oh well.

I was wearing "the" shirt when my family and I went to Fiesta Texas sometime shortly after 1st grade. While we were there a picture was taken of me sitting on a giant lion statue.

Then sometime in high school it was cool to start wearing old t-shirts again. So we all pulled out our shirts for grade school or swiped on from a cousin or something. For some crazy reason must have been laundry day I wore my shirt from 1st grade on our senior trip. Ironically I took a picture with another giant cat statue (tigers this time, I think). It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I noticed the crazy similarities in these two photos.

A new adventure...

...in sewing.

Last weekend I found this video on threadbanger that has a tutorial for making a pill box hat. I made one on Monday that turned out pretty bad :/ Last night I made a second attempt and it turned out much better.

I wore my hat to classes today and was told I looked like everything from a little Russian girl to a stewardess. Also about 42 people said I looked like I was wearing a yarmulke!?! I did get a lot of compliments about my hat :)

So I'm finally at the point in my life where I can where whatever I want and not care about what people think or say about it. That’s why I could wear my silly little hat today and not get fazed when some people laughed, at one point that would have kept me from wearing something I was proud of. Anyway, enough of that. Kevin came overto take pictures, so here they are...

A new studio...

...Where I photographed the new bag I made with my new zippers...it's just a new kind of day. I think this is the best bag I've ever made.



























When I say new studio, it's actually a white sheet duct taped to the wall above the desk in my dorm room. But it's the best I can do for now. It's kind of fun to see what you can do with a limited amount of money and equipment :)




















I don't know about everyone else, but the lighting in my room is pretty crummy. When I use a flash the colors get washed out and it creates weird looking shadows. So I use the $20 tripod I got at Wal-Mart and turn my flash off. It creates much better looking photographs. It's also easiest to use a solid colored evenly lighted backdrop. Even though I'm having fun improvising, once I make $50 I'm driving straight to Wal-Mart and buying the small light kit they have there :)

WooHoo...

I got mail, I got mail *in sing song voice*

As you all know, my birthday was earlier this month. At the time I had no idea what I wanted so my mom just gave me an IOU. Then I decided on what I wanted...a box full of...100 zippers! Now I have the materials needed to make all the zipper bags that I want to. So today I headed to the mailboxes and found a note saying I have a package to pick up. I was my zippers! They are beautiful and in every color of the rainbow, plus a bunch of other colors.

Aren't they lovely?!?

New Blog to check out

A while back I mentioned that my dad had a blog...well now my sis has one too. All we have to do is get my mom to start blogging then we'll be a whole family of bloggers! My sis's blog is called Rants & Raves. My sis tends to be a little more opinionated then we like. Each post will consist of a rant about something and a rave about something else (duh, now I'm just stating the obvious.) Anyway, she was nice enough to showcase me in her first post as the rant, I mean rave. Ok, all joking aside, you should really go over and check out my sis's blog...because I said so.

The door to...

My parents have been thinking about buying a new house for quite a while. After lots of looking and consideration they have decided that building a new house is the best way to go for us. So we are going to be building a house on the same property we already own in the country and renting out our current house.

On Saturday my parents and I were checking up the upper area of the property to make sure everything is good, since the dozer is coming in a few days. While we were walking around we found this crazy looking door in the ground. You could tell it had been there for a long time.

My dad decided to see where it went to...





























And then he was gone...

Where did my dad go?? To one of the other 9 Kingdoms? The Underworld? The land of the elves? We're just not sure, he never came back.









(Ok...really he's fine and it was just the old door off our house that was put in the woods for awhile before we could get rid of it...fooled ya' didn't I?!?)

A Scoodie and Ninja gloves?!?

Yeah, that's right. That's what you get when you cross a thread heads video with a sweatshirt.

I discovered threadbanger last night through an e-mail from Disney (yes, I'm a nerd). On the threadbanger sight there are thread head videos telling about DIY projects and DIY designers. It's pretty cool and I've watched a ton of the videos in the last two days.




















Tonight I pulled out an old church sweatshirt and got to work to create this...










<---I'm hardcore...don't forget it!






This was a fun little project to do, and useful since it's been so stinkin' cold lately.

Flashback Friday...3

It's a bird, it's a plane...it's SuperRascal!*














He was the greatest of the crime fighting dogs...

Faster then a tossed treat
More powerful then a chew toy
Able to leap the fence in a single bound.

During the day this dog hero would pretend to be a normal dog, living with a normal family. I was only able to capture him in action because I was the Lois Lane to his Superman and he trusted my 11-year-old self and my fast shutter reflexes to keep his secret.

I can only reveal his identity now because Rascal is, well...not with us anymore :(

Wow, that's kind of a sad ending...so umm, puppies are cute. My sis just got a new puppy.



*(SuperRascal! is all one word. You must say it fast and with lots of emphasis.)

I just can't stop...

...sewing.

I hope you guys aren't getting tired of looking at all the bags I'm making. I promise I will move on to something else soon. I'm constantly looking on various websites such as Craftster and Etsy for inspiration for projects.

Here's my latest bag...

I've been using a lot of different fabrics on my bags and have scraps left of all of them. So I think I'm going to cut a 4" X 4" square of all of them and make a small quilt just for fun.

Current read: Write it when I'm gone

On a sewing spree

All day today all I wanted to do was some more sewing. I made another zippered bag...I'm going to have to find stuff to put in all these bags I'm making. I made this bag using some old animal print fabric that was previously used for beanie baby sleeping bags and the lining is brown linen-like fabric. It wasn't very smart to use a medium-weight fabric for the outside and a heavier fabric for the inside; it caused some bunching around the zipper ends. But it was a mistake I learned from!

After finishing my bag I got on craftster and was looking around for inspiration and found this post for a dice bag. I thought it was pretty neat so I made one for Kevin because he's kind of a nerd who plays those kinds of games that require lots of dice. I wanted to put a cool picture on the bag like the one in the craftster post, but had no capability. So I resorted to making a tag with a "K" on it and I sewed it into the bag.

I think it's the first thing I've sewn for Kevin. I like the smile he had when I gave the bag to him earlier, so I might start making things for him more often...

A matching bag

I had some fabric left from the messenger bag that I made last month and I used it to make a matching zipper bag. This is my second small-zippered bag using this tutorial. As promised, this time I took step-by-step pictures. WARNING: There are tons of pictures :)

The bag didn't turn out exactly perfect since I'm using my own machine which I discovered tonight has no zipper foot :/

I started by cutting out 6" X 8" rectangles using a pattern I cut out of a piece of newspaper.

I layered the lining fabric right-side up, the zipper right-side up, and the outside fabric wrong-side up.

Sew the fabric next to the zipper, flip the fabric to wrong sides in and sew next to the zipper again.

Repeat with the other two pieces of fabric.

Then MAKE SURE TO UNZIP THE ZIPPER and line the lining pieces together and the outside pieces together and sew around the edges...leaving an area open in the lining to turn everything right side out.

Turn right side out, poke out corners, and finish stitching the lining.

Tah Dah...you have a cute zipper bag!
I made my bag so that when it is flipped over the tree just keeps on going...so yes the back picture is upside down on purpose.

Here is my new bag with the bag I made last month! I'm pretty happy with how they both turned out.

I hope the pictures help if any of ya'll are planning on making a little zipper bag. They're really convenient for keeping make-up, medicine, and other small things together and easy to find in a purse.

Dancin' like Fred Astaire...

...well not yet.

I'm into my junior year at college and I figure it's time to do some things that have been on the to-do list for years. That is to take the classes I want to take, not just what is required. My chosen classes are choir, piano, and....DANCE!

Just so you understand what level I'm on...I can't read vocal music, I have only ever played four bars of music on the piano, and was raised in a church that did not allow dancing.

This semester I decided that if I don't get started I'm going to run out of opportunities to take these classes. So I sacrificed my regularly scheduled lunch time (that is a big deal for me) for choir and tap dance! BTW, my university added a musical theatre major this semester and now my tap dance counts for my theatre minor! My "just-for-fun" class is now put to some use.

Today was the first day of actual dancing in tap class. I learned all sorts of cool things like how to do a shuffle-hop-toe and the Susie-Q. I'll be on America's Got Talent before you know it! Well maybe not since this is only Tap 1.

Later in the semester the choir is going to go on a two day tour. I get to get out of classes to travel to high schools and universities in the area to do something fun :)

Picture from last year's tour.

Photo editing

Here's some editing I did at work one day. These three pics show some variations of the same technique. This is a photo that I took about a year and a half ago to use up some film. They're of Kevin practicing in the band room for his lessons the next day the entire back wall of the room is covered with mirrors (I was actually lying on the floor so I wouldn't be seen in the mirrors.)

Just Kevin in color.













Everything that is not a reflection is in color.













All the reflections in color.













If you missed out on the tutorial that explained how to create pictures like these you can find it here.

Roadtrip to the Roundup

Around one o'clock today I got a call from my mom asking if I wanted to meet her and dad at a diner. I said "sure." We met in a small town about an hour from my university and an hour from home, and ended up at the Roundup Restaurant.














It was a bustling little place. When we went in we were lucky to grab a table and more people kept coming in. I'm really surprise at how busy a small diner in a town that has a size B school can be. There was nothing glamorous about the place but it is a hit among the locals, and it's easy to see why. They have the biggest chicken fried steak I've ever seen in my life and the smallest salad!




















On my way to the diner I saw three beautiful horses and was going to take a picture of them on the way back and of course they weren't in the pasture anymore :( So if you were wanting to see some Oklahoma horses then you'll just have to "hold your horses." (Sorry I just couldn't resist.)

Flashback Friday...2

It's time for the second Flachback Friday!

I'm the little one.

All I've got to say is it doesn't get any cuter then that :)

This picture is from when I was 3 or 4, so that makes my sis 6 or 7. The story is that I was learning the pledge of allegiance at preschool or something like that and we were showing my parents how it is done. (And yes...I've learned by now that it is done with the other hand.)

Bop Bop Sh-Bop

Today my parents and I went on a road trip...to the 50s! Really we just turned off HWY 75 and ate at the Be-Bop Diner. It's a relatively new restaurant but has the feel of days-gone-by. I'm a fan of Happy Days, Route 66, and all those old things and this the Be-Bop diner made me feel like I was almost there!














There were cute things on the menu such as the Johnny B.L.T. Goode and the You ain't nothin' but a hot dog! But I ended up being lame getting the usual classic hamburger. It was good. So I'll stop rambling and show the pictures I took...


































So for kids 12 and under the food comes in a classic car. I was drooling over the cars hrmm, looking at them when the lady asked me if I wanted my food in one too. Heck yeah, I did! I'm not that far from 12...right?? All you have to do is switch the two numbers...anyway, my fries came in the cutest cardboard classic car I've ever seen!











I hope the Be-Bop Diner is successful so I can eat there again next time I'm home from college.
Speaking of college...I have to go back tomorrow :( Blah, I'm enjoying my break to much to think about school work right now.