Monday, February 25, 2013

ICCAs, nudity and reckless popcorn making.

Sorry for no post yesterday.
ICCAs threw me through and exhaustion loop.
But, guess what?
3rd PLACE BABY CAKES!
Cloud 9's music director, Shane, with his 3rd place award!
Cloud 9!
UCSC's Cloud 9 ROCKED THE HOUSE!
And yes, it was just as ridiculous as you can imagine.
Our ICCA set will be up on youtube soon, and when it is, I will come back here and add a link to it.
You can always search "UCSC Cloud 9" into youtube to see some of our older shtuffz from years past and this year as well.
And in case you were wondering, our set included "Nature Boy", "All My Life" and "Lost in the World/Please Don't Stop the Music" mashup. And even though I despise Rhiannah's music beyond all musical things imaginable, that mashup is my favorite arrangement we've ever sang. So, props to Skylar, the leader of the great Sopranos, the one with perfect pitch, and the one with arrangement skillz bestowed to her by the Gods.
Or something.

This happened. 
Besides the ICCA excitement on Saturday, Sunday was relatively normal. Courtney and I listeend to "This American Life" and worked on our self portraits for our art class and then trekked over to the photo studio to pose for Cedar's "Body" project for her printmaking class. I feel like it should have been weird posing nude with my housemate while my other housemate photographed us for her project, but this isn't really the first time this has happened (ie: naked run, apartment figure drawing night, etc). We might embrace nudity too much for the average person, but hey, bodies are beautiful, and we enjoy celebrating them. After that, we all headed back to our apartment where Cedar decided to make popcorn for us. This lead to Cedar almost waking everyone up in our apartment building because she made popcorn the good-ole fashion way (on the stove with a pot) and then spilled the popcorn onto the burner which smoked a lot and set off our fire alarm. You could karate-chop the smoke in our apartment it was so thick. This not only made our apartment smell like burnt popcorn, but the entire hallway, seeing as Courtney and I opened every window and door to the outside world while Cedar fanned the fire alarm so that it would stop screaming and not alert the campus firemen and not set off the apartment fire alarm and force everyone to stand out in the cold at 1 in the morning.
And then we watched Walking Dead, which terrified me.
And that was my Sunday.
And Monday updates may become more regular than Sunday, but I don't know. College be cray or whatever. It really just depends on my schedule week to week.
AIGHTS?

Love,

       Neffie

Monday, February 18, 2013

On 3 day weekends, Monday is the new Sunday

It's true.

This weekend I took my good ole' boyfriend to my hometown to see Yosemite.
We had a mighty grand time looking at waterfalls and climbing around on rocks and hiking and realizing just how out of shape we were. We also managed to hit the slopes at Badger Pass, the small ski resort in Yosemite.
It was a time.
Quite a time.
Unfortunately, this meant no DIY projects.
Yep.
Sorry, Charlie.
There might not be any next week either because my a'cappella group, Cloud 9 (look us up!) has ICCA's.
Yes, that competition from "Pitch Perfect" exists.
Here's some photos from my favorite place in the world.
Enjoy and have a happy week!









Sunday, February 10, 2013

Tea My Valentine! DIY Reusable Tea Bags!

Valentine's Day is coming up.
And even when I've been single, I've never hated the holiday simply because I believe that you're supposed to tell the multiple people in your life that you love them and not just your significant other.
To me, this makes Valentine's Day more special.
And yeah, it's corny, but it's also important to really tell the people in your life that you love them.
Not that you shouldn't be doing this all the time already, but this holiday is a good excuse to shower the people you love with extra extra extra attention.
A little like Christmas in that sense.
ANYWAYS,
This year, I decided to make some reusable tea bags and gather some tea together for a few near and dear in order to ask them to "Tea My Valentine"
Yup. I just went there.
Making the reusable tea bags was really easy and cost about 6 dollars per person. However, if you have muslin and embroidery floss and have loose leaf tea you'd like to share, this project could cost you basically nothing.
Here's the lo-fi low down on the how to:

Reusable Tea Bags

Supplies:

-Sewing machine (or, you could sew by hand, it'd just take longer)
-at least a 3.5x2.5 rectangle of wide-weave muslin (this will get you one tea bag)
-cotton thread or hemp or ribbon...something "stringy" to use at the drawstring for the bag
-scissors
-ruler
-pencil/chalk
-embroidery floss and needle (this is optional of course, you don't really need to embroider the bags, but it is fun!)


Steps:

1) Gather materials
2) Using a pencil or chalk and a ruler, draw out a 3.5 by 2.5 rectangle on your muslin. Mark where 3 inches is. You'll be folding the extra half inch over your "drawstring" when you sew. Cut it out that snazzy shnazzy rectangle! (Note! A nomal index card is 3x2.5, which makes for a good template!)
Step 2 (I used an index card as my template)






  3) Cut about 12 inches of drawstring off of its original source and lay it on the edge of your rectangle (which should be wrong side up) length wise. Fold .5 inches of the length of the rectangle over the drawstring and pin it down. I used hemp in case anyone was wondering.
Step 3
 4) Coax your temperamental sewing machine into doing you a favor by please please letting you sew a seam over the .5inch fold. Be careful not to snag your string! And if you are afraid of snagging it, you can always sew and then push your string through the opening instead. I just don't have the patience for that.
Step 4




                5) Fold the soon to be holder of all teas worthy of your nearest and dearestest's in half so you have a square. Sew around the edges until it's all connected. Remember to do this with the wrong side facing you, the next step is to turn it inside out.
Step 5 completed! And even after a tension check, it still came out all wonky. Sewphie has an attitude problem.



6) Turn it inside out.
7) Tea bag! Yay! Now you can embroider it if you want to or make a ton more! Or whatever!
Finished tea bag with a (poorly) embroidered cat! Meow!
There you have it, folks. 
You can also purchase reusable cloth tea bags at some grocery stores or tea shops if you'd just like to embroider them or if you just like the idea of filling the tea bags with loose leaf and don't want to make them. I'm not your mother, do what you want and remember to tell your friends that even though they may drive you crazy and force you to watch the L-word with them, that they are still near and dear to your heart. Worthy of hand embroidered tea bags.
Tea mine.
Like "Be mine"?
I'm done.

Love,

          Neffie


Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Tea Garland

Here in apartment 402, we like to do things a little differently.
Sometimes, it involves an indoor windowsill garden.
Or a life-size nude, self portrait of Cedar that she drew herself.
Or a wall of Jesus and Mary memorabilia.
Or a wall of sketched boobs.
Or a part of a wall of some artsy, nakie pictures.
We embrace nudity here.
As well as the vegetarian, gay, and free-spirited, artistic life style.
Something else we tend to be very pro about is tea drinking.
And good lord, when I mean pro tea, I mean it.
It's ridiculous.
But seriously.
At the end of fall quarter, Courtney had to make a sculpture for her art class using a "found" object.
She chose tea bags as her found object and made a crate look like it had been broken by the weight of tea bags in it and had spilled all over the floor into a large pile.
However, in order to obtain these tea bags, what did she do? Tell Cedar and I to start saving our used tea bags for her.
In about 3 weeks, we had drank about 200 cups of tea in total. That's about 60 cups for each of us over three weeks, or 20 cups of tea a week each, close to 3 cups a day.
This doesn't even insinuate the fact that we all will use the same tea bag about 3 or 4 times before getting a new one.
If you are thirsty in this apartment, you don't drink a glass of water, you drink a glass of tea.
Anyways, after the beautiful sculpture by Courtney, we continued to save our tea bags out of habit and with a "maybe we can do something else with them" attitude.
Well, we did.
And by we, I mean mostly Courtney and Cedar.
I had no vision, they were the masterminds.
So, one night, while pintresting or doing something unproductive, Courtney and Cedar began to tie tea bags to a large string of hemp and then stood on top of the table and strung the garland across our kitchen.
It actually looks pretty punk rock and it's fun to look at the tea drinking patterns of our apartment. Since the dried bags were set in a bread bag in a similar order as to which they were steeped and Cedar and Courtney tied them to the hemp from top teas to bottom, this pattern isn't just random, it's relatively accurate to what we've drank each month.  There will be little clumps of earl grey or camomile and ginger pear which then turns into a section of english breakfast and mate lemon. Of course, the one downfall to the garland portraying our tea drinking habits is that it does not show the tea consumed in loose leaf form or the prepackaged tea that doesn't have a string on it, plus, I tend to be a stinker and rip the little paper thing off the end of my tea bag so you can't see what the flavor was, but I'm trying to stop this habit for the sake of our garland.
Originally, our garland only extended from the front entryway to above the bathroom door, but it now has a new chain zig-zagging back across the kitchen table to above Courtney's and my's door.
In life, there's a lesson for everything that you do.
This one says: "Trash is not really trash if you try hard enough and believe."
Have a great week.
Updated on Wednesday like a boss.


Here's a cartoony photo of hanging tea bags.

Love,

       Neffie





Monday, February 4, 2013

Reasons

There were no updates in the past oh, 2 monthsish is because of a number of reasons.
1) I got really busy with school, a job and cloud 9. I couldn't keep up and had to cut something, I cut my blog updates.

2) Winter break started and I thought "now I'll have time". Then, I got my wisdom teeth pulled and went skiing and to Las Vegas and then it was Christmas then New Years then back to school and no blog.

3) School started and I got sick, got really busy, got sick and then forgot last Sunday.

I do feel bad. I don't know how many of you even care all that much, but normal posts will resume on either Sunday or Monday nights starting this week (but not tonight). And I might move to Monday night just because of how my school schedule is working out this quarter.

So. For realzies.
Pinky swear.
Come back on Sunday (or Monday) for something that you'll (hopefully find amusing)

I might even try to upload something Wednesday as a little bonus because I've been so lame, but don't hold me to it too much because I do have an art project due on Thursday.

Love,
Neffie.