Cookies and More Roses

This week I continued making roses for my flower crown, but I decided that plain solid color roses were a little boring.  After all, real roses come in many colors and patterns.  I decided to take matters into my own hands and use watercolors to paint a beautiful two-toned rose.  Yellow roses that fade to orange are my personal favorite color, so why not start with those?

In the process of painting

I started by painting a colored band around the outer edge of the petals and then blending inward with only water.  I went around and did one side of every section, let those sides dry, then turned them over and painted the other sides.  Not every petal was just alike, but in nature is anything really perfect?  I feel like the unevenness added a layer of reality to the rose.

 I went ahead and made a solid red rose while the paint was drying.

Once the paint was dry, I had to decide which side I wanted to be on the outside and which side I wanted to be on the inside before curling.  I chose to have whichever side had more color further to the center of the section to be the outside.  This way, a hint of orange color could still be seen under the curl.  Even though this paper was much thinner and easier to work with than last week's, I still used a paintbrush barrel to curl the corners of the petals over.  I like how that method made them look.

All done

For some reason, this one gave me a harder time with the first three petals, and I had to make a series of tears to get them to fold at all.  I'll investigate more into this next week.  The watercolor palette I have is iridescent, so I ended up with a really pretty sparkly edge to the rose.

The two roses I made today.  I'll try to continue the exponential growth into next week, but after that it'll just be ridiculous.

A few weeks ago, I found a pin leading to this recipe for Thin Mint truffles.  Those cookie balls have been central in my thoughts for a long time, and last night, I finally decided that I needed to make them.  I used dark chocolate Ghiradelli melting wafers, since I don't particularly care for almond bark.  However, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma.  I went to my boyfriend's apartment to make them, and since he lacked both a food processor and Ziplock bags, I was worried I wouldn't be able to crush the cookies.  Thanks to his ingenuity, he found two stackable bowls and I was able to crush them by putting the cookies in the larger bowl and using the bottom of the other one to pummel them.  I let the balls freeze overnight before dipping them in chocolate to keep them from falling apart in the warm chocolate.  That has happened before, so be warned.

Complete with a decorative drizzle

I even had a little chocolate left over, so I dipped some cookies we also baked the night before in it.

The final chocolaty spread

Personally, I preferred my Oreo balls better, but these turned out to be exceptionally delicious.  The leftovers are currently in my freezer, hoping to survive the night so I can bring them to rehearsal tomorrow.

Oh baby

Even though I ended up not doing a lot of the things I wanted to over fall break, I managed to both catch up on a lot of sleep and make some pretty cool stuff.  These mint cookie truffles are definitely getting filed away for future reference.

Paper Roses and Pumpkins

That sounds like a hipster Tumblr URL.  Anyway, finally succumbing to my über-white girl and slightly hipster nature,  I have been yearning for a flower crown for as long as I can remember.  Not the cheap puffy flower kind with the ribbons that you get when you're a little girl (thanks, Mom), but the beautiful, elaborate, expensive circlets of the modern music festival.  One that says "I'm so in touch with nature, but mine's clearly better than yours because mine was $80 and yours was like, $60."  Since I am a poor college student who doesn't have $80 to spend on a fancy flower crown (pasta and ice cream on the other hand...), I decided I would make my own.  I found this tutorial for paper roses via Pinterest, and figured why not; I'll try to make a flower crown from it.

I also figured, why only have one color rose?  So I picked a few pretty colors of cardstock to fashion into fanciful foliage.  Then I went even further.  Why only have solid color roses?  Real roses come in many different color variations and patterns.  I figured that I could probably paint some contrasting colors, so I got some watercolors as well.  I've spent so much money at Joann's that I should probably be considered part owner.  (Or at least given a sponsorship.  Joann can ya hear me?)

My haul.  Look at those tiny little easels!  Look at them!

I printed out the rose petals from the tutorial and decided to use them as a pattern on my cardstock so I wouldn't have to worry about having a back and a front and all that jazz.

I started with a really pretty pearlescent peachy pink color.

I traced the template, cut them out, and used those as an additional template to trace two roses at the same time.  Then came the curling.  The tutorial says to use a pair of scissors to curl the paper, similar to how one would curl ribbon at the end of balloons.  However, this cardstock was WAY too thick to do that.  plus, the petals were so small and close together that it was hard to maneuver even my small scissors in there.  So, I took a paintbrush and used the barrel of it that to curl the corners under.

Freshly curled flat rose petals.

I won't go into too much detail on assembly since the original tutorial did a good job of it.  I glued the tab on the bottom of piece 4, and on the top of the rest.  The wire I used wasn't strong enough to poke through the cardstock, so I took a large sewing needle and made a hole in the center of every one after I glued them into the conical shape.  I put a ring of hot glue around the bottom of the outside of the cones to attach them to the next one.

A finished rose

This particular piece of cardstock was way too thick to properly wrap around and curl and manipulate.  After an hour and a half and only finishing one rose, I decided that my flower crown would probably have to be an ongoing project.

Not wanting to go to bed tonight without finishing anything, I picked up my watercolors and decided to do some painting on those adorable little canvases.  I cut a plastic water bottle in half to use as my brush holder, since I didn't want to give up any of my plastic drinking cups.  Also, it's environmentally friendly!  Sort of.  

Note the pumpkin pi.

At the end of the day, I'm happy with what I did.  Even though I didn't get my flower crown today, that rose turned out a lot prettier than I expected it to.  I thought it would be one of those Pinterest projects that is actually really hard and one has to be really skilled to do it.  It was actually really easy, and I don't really see a lot of places where it is possible to mess it up.  Even if it doesn't come out perfect, it makes it more realistic since nothing in nature is perfect to begin with.

So that's what I did today.

Making Letter Shirts

Today, I made letter shirts for my boyfriend.  His got eaten by the washing machine, so he enlisted my help in making a new one.  After a trip to Joann's where he carefully picked out the fabrics and Tshirts he wanted, he turned them over to my superior sewing skills.

Picking which fabric he wanted the letters to be

"The organic should be in the middle, framed by the geometric ones for balance." -Casey

I should probably mention now that I am not a member of Greek life.  I never have been, and I probably will never be a sorority girl.  Therefore, I have never done this before, so I just kind of winged it.  This tutorial was super helpful and was the one I followed.  We got the letters themselves from here, and since I am computer illiterate, Casey fixed them and printed them the size he wanted.  We tried making a letter sweatshirt, but that didn't end well.  It was so bulky, and I didn't have heat 'n bond and my sewing machine hated me that day, so that's sitting unfinished on a shelf somewhere in his closet.

Dorm life yo.  Check out my sweet setup.  I have all the essentials.  Sewing machine, cell phone, note cards, molecular model kit, shelf/printer, and motivational poster.

Thanks for the motivation, Ryan Lochte

I'm not going to go into much detail on how I made them, since there are other people who can do it much better than I can (see link above).  I will talk about how I knotted the fabric, though.  My sewing machine doesn't take exactly the same path in reverse as it does forward, so backstitching would have just given a messy finish.  To fix this, I took a hand needle, threaded the thread tail from the beginning and end of the stitching, and pulled in through to the inside of the shirt.  From there, I triple knotted it together to the tail ends from the underside.

I know yellow on yellow is hard to see, but I hope you get the gist. 

Regarding the Heat 'n Bond, I got the kind in the red package with the paper backing.  On my second trip to Joann's (the first being the trip to get the fabric), I got the kind in the purple package because it was supposedly more "sewable."  I hadn't worked with Heat 'n Bond before, so I was a very disappointed when I got home and it was nothing more than fusible interfacing that I already had 10 yards of for bow ties (but that's another post).  I tried to use that for the hoodie, but was more trouble than it was worth, so I went back for the fusible "no-sew" one.  My sewing machine had no problem going through it even though it said "DO NOT SEW."  It was EXPONENTIALLY easier than the first type.

From start to finish, each shirt took about an hour and twenty minutes to make.  The hardest part was probably setting my machine to a zig-zag pattern that Casey wanted.  Once that was done, it was simply aligning the machine to sew where I wanted to. 

The finished product.  He's a PiLam by golly.

I still have to iron on his nickname on the back, but that's easy.

Close up on stitching detail.  That's what bloggers do, right?  Check out that detail.  Hot damn. *wolf whistles*

For future reference, yellow letters on a purple shirt could probably do with a thin layer of interfacing or something so they don't get washed out by the darker background.

Anyway, sometimes I do things, and this was the thing I did today.