Stuff that I did

Seeing as how I'm feeling pretty sick today and have had to miss class because of it, I figure I might as well post some of what I've been up to in my classes this term.  Although I really like to complain about how busy life is this spring, things could definitely be worse--after all, everything I'm doing is at least mildly interesting to me.  Some of my classes even had me entertaining the idea of switching to graphic design, though I very quickly came to my senses.  At least part of my typography class has been interesting--I have to admit that I'm not very into our main project of redesigning a magazine, but our other project is to redesign the deseret alphabet, and that's actually been pretty fun. 

For those who don't know, the deseret alphabet is a phonetic alphabet that the Mormon church used for awhile once they came to Utah, but before they became a state (apparently it used to be all the rage to come up with new phonetic alphabets, since spelling was so un-standardized back then).  They used to publish their newspaper with it, and there were even some tombstones down in Cedar City written in the deseret alphabet, though I guess the families removed them and replaced them with modern, English ones (lame).  The problem is, the deseret alphabet was really, really ugly.  Some of the letters were so dissimilar that they don't even look like part of the same alphabet.  So our job was to redesign the letters of our name in a modern typeface, preferrably one without too many thick and thin lines because those would be really hard for us to design.  We were also supposed to make upper and lowercase letters, since another shortcoming of the deseret alphabet was that it only had uppercase, SO IT PROBABLY LOOKED LIKE PEOPLE WERE SHOUTING ALL THE TIME.

This is what I came up with, though blogger seems to have stretched it funny.  My name is written down at the bottom.  Like I said, lots of fun.

I'm also in a painting class.  We've been doing a lot of work in this class (probably more in the last few weeks than I did in a whole semester of my non-major painting class I took a couple years ago).  Our first assignment was to paint a bunch of squares in the style of Paul Klee using as many colors as possible.  My teacher said mine was "beautiful", so that's good, I guess.

Our most recent assignment that we turned in was to do a grisaille still-life.  I chose my Kitchenaid mixer that my grandma gave me for our wedding (by the way, thanks Grandma!  I hope Mongolia is a little bit warmer these days!).

Maybe I should learn to use the school's really big scanner--then maybe I wouldn't always be so disappointed in my image quality.  Oh well.

In graphic design we've been designing a logo for Ugmo, a company that makes underground monitoring systems for lawns that monitors water content and hooks up to the sprinkler system so that the sprinklers only go off when the lawn actually needs water.  Kind of a cool concept.  This is my most recent design for that:

Yeah, that stretched funny, too.  Imagine that they're actually circles.

Finally, I'm in a digital illustration class.  Our first assignment was to make an illustration based on a fortune from a fortune cookie.  Mine was "buy someone a thoughtful gift of love."  This is what I came up with:

Man, this stretched funny too!  Maybe blogger just hates computer art.  I didn't really like how this one turned out anyway, but I did learn a lot about using Illustrator.  Oh, and pretend that I actually finished it.  Anyway, our next assignment (the one due today, that I'll probably have to drag myself out to turn in) was to make the front page for an Independent Study course on speed reading.

For this I kind of went with the idea of a pop-up book.  Interesting that this one didn't stretch funny.  Maybe blogger just hates Adobe Illustrator?  Oh well.

This is pretty much what my semester's been like so far.  I have major projects coming up in basically all my classes, so we'll see how much blogging I get done between now and June 17th--maybe not a lot.  I'll try to post something every now and then, though.

Oh, and this is a side note--has anybody heard of Vienna Teng???  Because she's my favorite singer/songwriter ever, probably, but nobody's ever heard of her!  If you have time, look up Blue Caravan (one of my favorite songs), Shasta (Chris's favorite song that she sings), and Gravity (everyone else's favorite song).  Anna Rose and Lullaby for a Stormy Night are both lullabies, but they're both really good, too.  I also love My Medea, The Tower, Antebellum... well, a lot, really.  Look her up.

Sunday Picnic

This semester has been pretty stressful. Taking four classes during spring term was, it seems, a somewhat foolish idea, and the amount of homework I have due every day and the amount of time I spend not sleeping at night is kind of ridiculous. Thankfully, in exactly one month it'll all be over with, and I'll be moving on to my much more peaceful summer term of bookbinding and figure drawing. That's not really what I want to talk about, though. Mostly I want to talk about today, and what an amazing Sunday it was.

For those who don't know, I'm planning on cutting my hair later this week, probably to about chin length. I was originally going to do it last week, but Chris, who is slightly devastated by this turn of events, asked if he could have one more weekend to spend with my hair, so we could take some pictures for him to look back on. Amused, I took pity on the poor soul and agreed. I'm glad I did, too, because we had a lot of fun doing it!

First we went to this great park in west Provo that nobody seems to know about and had a picnic. Then we just went around with our camera and the tripod and had some fun! Because I am considered the camera expert out of the two of us, I was generally the one setting up the lighting for the shots, which meant that I was the one sprinting from the camera to get into place while the camera timer ticked down. It was so much fun, though, and I considered it to be my exercise for the day.

Afterwards, Chris said we needed to go one more place to take pictures, and he ended up taking me to the park where we first met, and where he proposed. Basically, I'm pretty sure I ended up with the sweetest guy ever.

He even says he'll still love me when the hair comes off, which I guess means it must be true love! Seriously, though, check out this hair action:

For the sake of my sanity, it has to come off.

P.S.  Today I discovered Blogger in draft.  Could it be that all my Blogger formatting woes are at an end???

End of Finals!

Well, I may possibly have been one of the last people at BYU to finish with finals, since I was finishing a D&C test on Blackboard at 11:50 last night, but I'm finally done! I'm still having nightmares about it, though--I dreamed last night that I'd forgotten that I signed up for some classes (Italian Food and Intro to Copper :P ) and consequently failed them because I never went to class and forgot to take the finals. I checked my schedule when I woke up this morning, though, and I definitely did not sign up for those classes, so I'll probably be okay ;) Even more exciting, I'm finished with my generals! No more writing classes, or American Heritage, or anything that I don't want to take. Just art and whatever I want from here on out :)

I did finish my figure drawing project! Thankfully, my teacher let me finish four pictures instead of six, because they definitely took awhile. Not all of them are photographed very well, but here they are:

The last one is probably my favorite, but I do like them all. I also made some kind of abstract stuff for 3D design, the class that I hate:

The first one is steel that I bent with a torch and welded to a plate of steel. The second one is made of paper, but for some reason I had the hardest time in the world gluing it so it wouldn't fall apart! I mean seriously, how hard should paper be to glue? Thankfully, it held together long enough to be graded, and didn't break apart until I got it home 30 minutes later. I guess prayers are the best glue after all.

Chris and I do have a little break, so we're going to Oregon this weekend (tonight, actually!), but next Tuesday it's back to school as usual for Spring and Summer Term. I actually have a couple of graphic design classes (Intro to Graphic Design and Basic Typography), but I also have a computer illustration class that I'm looking forward, and I might be taking a painting class--I haven't decided whether that's going to be too much yet. I'm also taking Bookbinding and Intermediate Life Drawing this summer, so I'm pretty excited about my summer classes. Thank goodness for a break, though!

Just a little something

Finals are approaching, which for me mostly means I need to get my art in gear, though I do have two tests, as well. I'll probably put up some more art on this blog when it's all over, including pictures of what I did for 3D design (the class that I hate) and the rest of my figure drawing project. This is the first of four images that I'm turning in for my figure drawing final. Isn't she enough to give you baby envy? (as if I needed any help with that)

This is Makenzie, done in black and white prismacolor pencil on gray Strathmore paper. Thanks to Lindsay and the rest of mother's group for letting the most awkward woman in the world (me) crash mother's group and photograph their adorable children. Those pictures were a huge help!

Tomorrow is the first reading day, so... here we go!

Spring Fever

Yay for being April! Actually, I guess it's still technically March, but it's April in my mind. I can't even express how burned out I am with school right now, and how ready I am for this semester to be over. The timing is horrible, of course, because I still have a 10-page paper, a test and 7 art projects to go before I can even start thinking about finals. Which is why today I decided to be super responsible... and skip half my classes doing entirely non-school related things, like cooking, watching Project Runway, and, of course, blogging.

I have been more responsible than I'd like to be, though. For instance, I haven't spent my time finishing this:

Crochet is seriously gangsta. I have to admit that I lost motivation for this project 50% through. Just as I was getting really excited that I'd finished the first glove, I remembered--gloves come in pairs :( I still occassionally wear just the one glove, though, much to Chris's chagrin I'm sure. It keeps me surprisingly warm, and I feel like it's some sort of fashion statement. I have the yarn to finish it, though, so maybe I will someday.

I've also managed to restrain myself from making another one of these:

It's kind of weird, but I've been on a sort of homey, crafts kick recently where all I want to do is sew, crochet, and home decorate (though since we're planning on moving for the summer, I haven't bothered with any decorating). As a part of that, I decided that I wanted to learn how to knit. After doing some online research, I ended up buying Knitting for Baby, because I heard it was perfect for people who'd never knit before--it explains it well, and every project introduces a new concept in order of difficulty. The hat above is the very first project in the book, and I think I did pretty well--I only dropped 5-10 stitches, and all of those were in the first half of knitting. I have no immediate use for it, though (and anticipate not using it for quite some time--after Suzanne's blog announcement, I figured I should clarify this), so I guess I'll just have to box it up for later. Once this semester's over, I do want to make another hat, maybe this time in a boy's color. The next project in the book is a blanket, and I want to do a really good job, so I figure I could probably use some more practice before starting on that.

However, I couldn't restrain myself from making this:

Recently, I decided that I want to work on my food photography, so I'm going through my favorite recipes, cooking, and photographing them, and I'm going to compile them into a little cookbook that I might publish online using Lulu or mypublisher.com or something. I had actually never made this recipe before--I was just online and had somehow wandered onto the Johnny Carinos website and I realized that I had to have Italian food. Immediately, if possible. The description of Chicken Milano looked good, so I started looking up recipes and eventually found this one, which is actually a copycat recipe of the Chicken Pasta Milano at Macaroni Grill. It turned out great, though there were some mishaps along the way. First of all, it called for 4 chicken breasts, and after skimming over a few reviews I found that most people thought there wasn't enough sauce in the recipe, so I figured that since I was cooking for two, I could half the chicken and be okay. Turns out there still wasn't enough sauce (so anybody who'd actually made the full recipe would've really been in a bind!). So next time I'm halving the chicken again (because there was too much of that for my taste), and I'll probably still double the sauce, and then it might work out. The second problem was with the basil. Basil is the last thing you add to the sauce, so I was almost done when I happily added the two tablespoons the recipe called for. It was right as the second tablespoon went in and the little green leaves were spreading everywhere that I had that heart-stopping moment of fear--was it 2 tablespoons of fresh basil, or dried? I had used dried, but as I looked at the overabundance of green now permeating the sauce, I was very much afraid that it was referring to fresh (and there's a definite difference between 2 tbsp. of fresh basil and 2 tbsp. of dried!). So I immediately added more half and half to thin out the green, then took my handy dandy strainer to see how much I could get out. Unfortunately, I couldn't really take out the basil without also taking out a lot of sundried tomatoes, though in the end that might have been a good thing, because there really were a lot of sundried tomatoes. However, miraculously, the recipe still tasted good, which for me means it's a keeper. I just need to quarter the chicken, double the sauce, half the basil, and maybe use less sundried tomatoes, and I'll be set (seriously, who wrote this recipe??).

Here's the recipe with my edits:

Chicken Pasta Milano (serves 2)

2 tablespoons butter

3-4 cloves garlic, minced

3/4 cup sun-dried tomato, chopped

2 cups chicken broth, divided

2 cups half-and-half (original recipe called for heavy cream, but this is healthier)

1-2 boneless skinless chicken breasts (your choice, depending on how much meat you want)

garlic salt

pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons basil

4-5 oz. fettucine pasta, cooked and drained

In a large saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Add the minced garlic and cook for about a minute. Add tomatoes and 1 1/2 cups of chicken broth. Increase heat to medium and bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered, for about 10 minutes. Add cream and bring to a boil again, stirring frequently. Simmer over medium heat until sauce is thick.
Sprinkle garlic salt and pepper over both sides of chicken. Heat the olive oil in a skillet, then add chicken and saute until chicken is no longer pink in the middle (about 4 minutes each side should do it). Remove chicken from skillet and set aside somewhere warm (like a warm oven). In the same skillet, stir 1/2 cup chicken broth with the pan juices, and bring to a boil; reduce slightly and add to the cream sauce. Stir in basil.

Slice chicken and serve atop the pasta, coat with the cream sauce.

An alternate way is to slice or cube the chicken and mix it in with the sauce, then serve that over the pasta.

Photo shoot with Chelsie (and a beautiful jacket)

My parents are spending the week in Portland selling their book (good luck Mom and Dad!), and that means that all of my siblings are home alone with Jordan in charge. So, since I have nothing going on Wednesday evenings and Chris has class until 10, I figured I'd head down there, make some zuppa, and hang out a bit. We had a really good time--they appreciated the real food, I stole their Sweethearts, and we all watched Ghost Whisperer together (a show that they're apparently really in to right now). I also took advantage of this opportunity to take some pictures for my photography class. I decided to photograph Chelsie jump roping. I guess I could've chosen my location better (my teacher was complaining about the telephone pole in the background), but I thought they were cute :) Oh, and... maybe don't tell Chelsie I posted these? ;)

Lots of fun :)

I also wanted to tell you guys about a new boutique I heard about in the Daily Universe yesterday called Lady Danburry Tailoring & Design. She has a blog at ladydanburrysews.blogspot.com, and also an Etsy shop. I checked out her blog yesterday and found out that if I advertised for her on my blog, I could maybe win a beautiful coat!





















Yep, that beautiful coat. So that's what I'm doing. Check her out--I really like a lot of her stuff!

First post of the decade (sad, huh?)

So I just realized that I haven't posted anything all decade! (Sounds worse than it is, doesn't it?) Actually, I didn't just realize it--I've been aware of the fact for a while, now. But since I have the day off of school (thank you, George Washington) I decided to do something about it today.

It's been kind of a busy semester. Chris and I are both taking classes, and he's working full time(more on my own unemployment later), so we don't tend to see a lot of each other except on weekends. This past weekend was a particularly good one, though. It was Valentine's Day yesterday (which I've noticed is a much better holiday when you actually have a Valentine), and we celebrated by making homemade risotto and steak. Yummmm. Chris gave me flowers and chocolate in the morning, and I made him chocolate chip cookies in the afternoon, and it was a really good day. I also finally started using my Wacom tablet that I got for Christmas. I mean, I'd played around with it before, but I really had no clue what I was doing. Finally, though, I looked up a tutorial online, and realized that I wasn't treating it enough like painting--the process goes a lot smoother when you pick out a color palette and combine colors by varying opacities. Anyway, this is what I ended up with:

I guess it's a self-portrait, since I was going off of a picture of me. It's not really done, and I definitely hurried on the shirt, but that's probably as done as it's going to get. I guess it's not bad for my first tablet project, though I'm going to keep practicing--I definitely need to use a little more contrast.

I've also been taking a photography class. Luckily, I got my Pell Grant this semester, or else I probably couldn't have afforded this class--the teacher wanted us all to have D-SLRs, which are about $500 at their least expensive. Kind of ridiculous for a class with students who will probably never take another photography class again, but it is a good investment (better than a textbook), so it was kind of nice to have an excuse to buy one. It's been a good class, too--somehow, photography seems so much easier now. Here's some of my pictures:

These were done by shining a bright light through Jones soda bottles with the wrappers taken off. The assignment was to focus on color. It was fun to do, though apparently there's a Jones soda shortage going on--I had to go to five stores before I found one with even a semi-decent selection. Most stores didn't even have any. What's the deal, Jones?

I should probably mention that this is not our faucet. It's the faucet in the girl's bathroom of this random building across from Wyview that used to be an Albertson's, and is now used for bookbinding and other art classes. It's a pretty sweet faucet.

I don't really have a lot of drawings to report this semester, since my only drawing class is figure drawing, and I don't know how you'd feel if I was posting pictures of girls in bikinis and guys in Speedos. Figure drawing, as it turns out, is really hard. It doesn't really help that it's a 3 hour class from 7-10pm, either. I am getting a little better, though--I've been practicing by watching episodes of So You Think You Can Dance and pausing them to get cool poses to draw. I've also been drawing my own face a lot by taking pictures of me with the laptop camera and drawing off of them. It's kind of fun.

Recently, I've been learning to crochet. I even made myself a happy yellow scarf, pictured below:

Chris didn't think I'd ever finish it, so I finished it in less than a week. Turns out, I work best when trying to prove someone wrong. Go figure. Now I'm working on a scarf for Chris. This one's taking a little longer, since it's striped gray and navy, and I've had to learn how to change colors. I don't know if I'm doing it right, but it hasn't fallen apart yet, so that's something, right? I think I'm going to learn how to knit, too--there's this yarn shop in Provo, and the ladies there will teach you how to knit and crochet for free if you buy your supplies from them. Pretty cool, especially for a college student with a limited budget.

I'm not working right now, though I've been trying to find a job. It's been over a month with no success, though Brick Oven Pizza is looking really promising--my cousin works there, so I have an "in," which is about the only way to find a job these days. I'm really, really bugged that I even have to look, because I am not supposed to be unemployed right now. Last November, I decided to start looking for options aside from Pita Pit where I was working--mostly because they were overstaffed, and partly for other reasons--and I found out that Zupas was hiring. I interviewed, and was hired, and they told me that they'd start me the week after Thanksgiving so I'd have time to put in my two weeks notice at Pita Pit. So I did, and I stopped working at Pita Pit--and then Zupas put off my hiring date. First they said it would be in December, and then they told me that it'd be after New Years. So I went in at the beginning of January, and they said, "Oh yeah, we decided we couldn't hire you after all." Gee, thanks for telling me. Like I said, though, I'm really hoping for Brick Oven, and if that doesn't work then I have a possible in at the Sweet Tooth Fairy. That's been my major stress this semester, though. I have been typing a bit for my parents to promote the Reading Teacher's Plan Book, and that's been something, though I really would like a steady job again.

Well, that's about all I can think of to talk about. Basically, Chris and I are doing great, and we hope you are, too! So... ciao!