Recycle, Reuse, Redesign Project: Crocheting Flowers

Summer is a time to start new projects. Theoretically, you have more time (although I'm not sure if I do because I'm working and interning). Lately, every time I look in my closet or around my room I'm tired of all of my "stuff." I want new clothes, new jewelry, new decorations. But it's expensive and over-all wasteful to buy new stuff when I have perfectly good old stuff. So I've decided to start a little summer project:

1. I will recycle my old clothes/things by selling or trading them at buy/sell/trade places. Or I will donate them to places like the salvation army or various clothing drives. This will give me the opportunity to buy new things without having an excess of stuff.

2. I will reuse old clothes, old pieces of fabric, leftover yarn, and anything old in order to...

3. Redesign my old clothes, jewelry, etc. using things that I have reused.

For the past couple of months, I've been into crocheting. I made hats in the winter:

After my hat project, I had lots of leftover yarn. So I made a blanket out of the leftovers, creati

ng blocks and sewing them together.

The blanket took forever, and I had trouble coming up with a good picture of it, but it's a little bit smaller than a double bed, and it's goofy looking up I absolutely love it! And it's really warm in the winter.

But now summer is here and it's too hot to be wearing hats or lying under wool quilts. So I've moved on to crocheting flowers.

I've decided to use some of the tiiiiiny bits of leftover wool I have to make flowers. And they're

great for decorating--reusing and redesigning! This site has some great patterns for flowers. I suggest using them to make jewelry. I've seen some really great crocheted necklaces, and I still haven't attempted them yet. This necklace looks beautiful.

However, my favorite thing to do with the flowers is add them to clothing. You can pin them to clothes as either a way to add color or alter the garment. For this skirt I attached some different colored flowers to the side. It's a work skirt, and I have to wear black shirts at work and I end up look like I'm going to a funeral without the flowers on this skirt!

Another thing I tried was I had a dress that kept falling off of my shoulders. The dress is a weird cut... there's a little tie in the back but otherwise your back is bare. So I pinned the back and stuck a flower on it to make it look nicer and make it fit:

I'm super excited about redesigning my stuff. If anyone needs any crochet patterns for anything, let me know and maybe I can help you out!!

Festival! Forks!

Right now, Ithaca Fest is going on here in upstate New York. One of my roommates and I wandered around for a little bit, eating general tso's chicken from a little booth. Festivals always bring out the most interesting people--I saw a woman who was legitimately dressed like a colorful witch in the 85 degree weather.

At one point we were eating our food and this old woman asked if the chairs next to us were taken and when we said no she sat down right next to us, not moving the chair or anything, and struck up a conversation with us about her spinach curry and the weather. She was sweet though.

Anyway, we walked into a new thrift store and I got a pencil-style dress for 6 dollars and then we headed down the street. The coolest thing we came across was this:

Incase you're wondering, yes, that is a car made of forks. The guy at Fork-Art had everything from little people made of forks playing instruments, to the grim reaper, to a spoon in a coffin, to jewelry. So cool.

This one was awesome too:

This is the first summer of my life where I've discovered how cool fork art is-- Too bad I don't know how to do it. It'd definitely be something cool to try!

This American Life, Busses, Road Trips, and the Transitional State

This weekend I traveled to a different part of New York by bus since I'm (happily) car-less right now (go public transit!). This morning, I had to wake up at 4:30am because I had to work at 6:30am and found myself listening to This American Life, a radio show that interviews different people about their experiences on any given topic, as a way to wake me up before a nine hour shift. It wasn't like there was anyone on Facebook chat to talk to or anyone I could text.

This particular broadcast focused around road trips, which was fitting since I had just been on a road trip of my own only the day before. The first guy they interviewed was Dishwasher Pete, a man who traveled across the country via greyhound bus, washing dishes as he went as a way to support himself. He published a book about it, Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, and was also the author of a zine.

This American Life gave Dishwasher Pete some equipment and sent him out to prove a theory he had: That people on greyhound busses were in some type of transitional state where they were deep in thought and in the middle of a grandiose story/journey.

I couldn't agree with him more. I don't really mind long bus rides (I was on a bus for a total of 10 hours this weekend). I love thinking of where I'm going, where I've been, and I love watching the scenery as it rolls by. I've had some pretty scary bus experiences, where I've sat next to some pretty terrifying individuals--ones who told excessively violent stories, for example. But I've sat next to some nice passengers too. I've seen passengers bring kids on busses. I've seen them bring pets. And we're all stuck together for x amount of hours, watching the scenery fly by.

When Dishwasher Pete took a tape recorder on the bus with him, he couldn't really talk to any passengers that were in transition. Some didn't trust him, because of his radio equipment, and he couldn't really find anyone in a transitional state. He grew to dislike the bus, after having spent so much time on it.

I remember a particularly long bus trip that my friend Charlie and I were on about two years ago. We would be dying to get off the bus, and then we'd get off the bus at a rest stop, and all we would want to do was get back on the bus. We joked that the bus was basically like what growing up in New Jersey was like-- You'd want to get the hell out, and then you'd get out, and you'd feel like there was nothing to do except go back.

But all joking aside, I think what This American Life was getting at is that busses and road trips can be seen as these end-all be-all experiences where people's lives will be in transition and they will actually come out of them transformed.

The thing is, though, that every time I've been on a bus, I've thought of all these great things I was going to do when I get off the bus. And I don't really do them. Maybe it's easy to be in an transitional state when you're moving, but once your feet hit the ground after you step out of the vehicle, even if you're hundreds of miles away from home, 9/10 times your life hasn't changed that much.

The broadcasted episode was really great, and if you want you can get it here or subscribe to their podcast on itunes.

Bridging the Generation Gap-- Clueless and the Golden Girls

Clueless is probably my favorite teen movie ever. My birthday was Clueless themed.

Also, I grew up on the Golden Girls and would watch it with my mother. Everyone in my family loved that show, including my grandpa, which was sort of strange. Lately, Betty White has been huge on the teen/young adult circuit, and the newest development has been this:

Clueless Meets the Golden Girls

Honestly, this was kind of a pointless post, but I feel like I need to pass this link around through as many avenues as possible.

Enjoy!

Something About Being 20

One of the things I've noticed about living in a new place is how amused I get by stupid errands. I think I feel like I'm playing house, and although I lived in the exact same apartment during the school year, I suddenly feel more inclined to do apartment-y things. I just color coordinated my closet for no real reason, and today I found walking to the grocery store super fulfilling. I'm not really all that domestic of a person, and I feel like I'm sort of just playing house. During the school year I was too busy to really focus on taking care of myself--like trying to eat really healthy and going for walks to get exercise. And now that I can it's new and exciting. Maybe I'm just a little kid who likes living in a kind of fantasy land where I'm playing adult--going to work and cooking good meals.

That's the thing about being 20, you're just kind of floating in this place where you're not financially independent, really, or not old enough to go to bars but you're out of high school and conceivably "more mature."

Yesterday, my roommate, our friend and I went to see Sex and the City 2 to see for ourselves how much of a shit show it was going to be (plot was better than I was expecting, but it was sort of racist which really pissed me off). There were these girls sitting in front of us (they came in a pack of like 10-12) and the three of us started to take bets on whether or not they were seniors in high school or college students. They ended up having just graduated from college, and I could've sworn they were all 17.

One of them let out a high-pitched excited scream during a Twilight trailer. When my friends and I started laughing hysterically at the overly-dramatic trailer a few of them turned around and gave us pissed off looks and one actually said, "I don't understand why it's so funny that I turned around." We told her that we were laughing at Twilight and I felt like I was in the tenth grade during the whole awkward exchange.

But the thing is, they were older than all of us and on their way to having actual Adult Lives and living in The Real World and not just playing house but one step closer to owning a house.

I feel like I spend my time feeling totally split between the younger-young adult world and the older-young adult world. I can hang out with people who are 24-26 and feel totally comfortable, but couldn't go out for them with a drink if I wanted to and I don't work full time and I'm still a student, and suddenly the differences seem more extreme.

And I'm not even really complaining. I don't find anything unappealing about playing house and being twenty, but I can't help but wonder: When I was 11, I felt in between a teen and a kid; when I was 14, I felt in between a middle schooler and a high schooler; when I was 17, I felt in between a senior in high school and a freshman in college. And now I feel in between again. When I'm 30, will I just feel in between my 20s and my 40s? They say the awkward, growing years are supposed to end once you're out of your teens, but I'm not really sure if I believe them. Most of the adults I know seem to be in between different milestones, and just go on living their lives neither here nor there.