An Update on My Life

Hello again, everyone! I hope you're having a great New Year's Eve, and that you have fun plans for tonight! Today I'm going to give you an update on some stuff in my life (I know, so interesting), which will hopefully be a bit of an excuse explanation for my recent radio silence.

1. School: I am really liking high school now, even though I kind of hate one of my classes. Nothing particularly interesting has been happening lately, unless you actually go to my school, though. It's mostly just been me drowning in homework, mostly for science, and, oddly, English. One cool thing I'm doing is making a French cooking show, which is my big project for, you guessed it, French. We're doing a cooking unit, so everyone has to make a video in the style of a cooking show showing how to make an actual French dish. Pretty cool, no? OK, on to more interesting things...
2. Extracurriculars: Marching band sadly ended on November 8, so I have nothing to do.... Obviously, I'm kidding! Winter guard started a week after that, so I've ridiculously busy with that. Our practices were from 7-10 on Tuesdays and Fridays, and 9-4 on Saturdays, until a week or two ago. Then we split into JV and Varsity (I'm a rookie, so I'm on JV) and now I'll be practicing 7-10 Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So don't expect any kind of brilliant writing during the week! (That is, if you get anything at all...) I'm really excited about the stuff I get to do in our show but I'll probably do a whole post on that some other time.
3. Fandoms: I'm so behind on Doctor Who, since I still haven't finished Series 7.2, so I haven't seen the 50th or the Christmas special. But I'll catch up eventually! (Spring break, anyone?) I'm anxiously awaiting January 19, and also considering sneaking on to a plane to England so I can watch Sherlock on Wednesday. On an unrelated note, I will be hiding in a safe, nonspoilery section of the Internet until the 19th. I'm slowly working my way through Supernatural, and I'm now just a few episodes away from Season 7. I'll get there eventually, although it would help if I just didn't get any science homework until February.....
4. Other Stuff: I got all of John Green's books for Christmas, and I have to admit, I kind of freaked out. I read TFiOS in two hours on Christmas, and I started AAoK last night. I don't have a problem, I swear.

I hope that didn't bore you too much, and kudos to you if you actually read it all! Hopefully I'll be back with another post soon, but no promises, right?

A Very Stripy Wreath

*Note: This post was written AGES ago, sometime in November I think, and I never got around to finishing and posting it. I'm trying to get back on track after a crazy month, so I thought I should start by finally showing you guys this.*

First, I would like to express my amazement that "stripy" is a word. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Hello, everyone! I hope you enjoyed your week! Today I'm going to be telling you about a project I did most of a couple weekends ago (I actually have no idea, it might have been last week). It's sort of a Christmas present for my mom, but I'll probably give it to her early, so she can use it this year. Here's what the finished product looks like:

I basically used this tutorial from Occasionally Crafty, but as you can see, the original looks a lot better. Oh well. Mine has..... character? My strips were smaller, which may have had something to do with it.....

Basically, I just spent an hour or two back-watching all of Nerdy and Quirky's videos (she's really good, go check her out) and cutting all these strips.

In the end, I had a huge pile of white, red, green, and forest green strips to use. As you can see, I tried to keep the wreath base on the bag at all times, because I didn't feel like having to vacuum up styrofoam bits when I was done.

Then, I started laying out all the strips like this:

And then I finished.

Now let me tell you, this was a bad way to do it. Although the strips did stay on pretty well when I flipped it over, it was a pain to try to fold them all over, then trim them, then pin them.... Let's just say that if you do this, you should not follow my example. Find someone else to follow, preferably someone who knows what they're doing.

So that's it, all I did after that was add some ribbon to hang it, then give it to my mom. She liked it a lot more than I was expecting, which was nice, and it's still hanging on our front door (on the inside, she didn't want to risk the weather).

I hope you had a great holiday season, and that your new year is awesome, too! I'm not sure if I'll post before then, but if not, happy 2014!