I'm doing art for FUN!

This break I've been doing art for fun, weird, huh? I can throw together any colors that I want and not have to worry about whether or not the colors I chose will take my grade down. I got professional watercolors for Christmas and I love them! I've never watercolor painted before and I'm still trying to figure it out, I'm struggling with making the colors I want and making patterns, but oh it is so fun!

I've gone a little earring crazy. Here are six more pairs of earrings I've made and I have the fabric to make several more.

And we decorated sugar cookies, which is also artsy and fun

And one day in the future I want to make one of these: a friend of mine, Candace Workman, who has one of my favorite blogs, gave me a link to a blog that gave me a link to this little movie thing that I think is cute! It's a montage of pictures of this little girl with her doll while she is in Paris. I want to make one of these dolls for one of my future girls. But first I need to learn some more sewing skills. Does anyone know if the intro. to clothing design sewing class at BYU is any good?

DIY Covered-Button Stud Earrings

I like a lot of earrings but there are very few that I actually like wearing, and when I saw these cute-o covered-button stud earrings at the farmer's market this last summer I fell in love with them and knew that I would actually like wearing them.

I was looking online to order some of these earrings for Christmas and pretty quickly I had $75 worth of earrings racked up in my shopping cart, which was most definitely not a realistic option. So I went searching online to find a video on how to make these earrings and I found a perfect video! These earrings are ridiculously cheap to make!

So this morning Adam and I ran to Hobby Lobby and got all of the supplies for about $12 and look what I made! It took me thirty minutes at most to make all three of them, and I was going kind of slow since it was my first time making them.

Now I want to find some fabric with little people and animals on it and make ones like these:

(Alice in Wonderland)

(The Tin man from Wizard of Oz)

And then I might move on to make ones that are like the ones in this video.

The end of a very long semester

Finals are over! How wonderful is that statement right there? SO indescribably wonderful! I was ready for this insanely busy semester to be over in September, and now it finally is! I even managed to bet a B in that awful stats class. Finals week tends to mess up normal life, including what you eat. There is absolutely no time to cook or go grocery shopping during finals week, or even time to eat for that matter, and I recently realized a trend in the sorts of things I ate in about 2 days:

Breakfast: Chocolate pop tarts

Lunch: 2 slices chocolate mousse cake

1 bottle chocolate milk

Midnight snack: Guittard milk chocolate chips

Hold-me-over to dinner: double stuf oreos smothered in peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies

To snack on in the testing center: Chocolate covered pretzels

There is a ton of other junk food that I ate between all of those, but I couldn’t believe how much CHOCOLATE I evidently craved and eaten all week long. My body is now craving vegetables and just a regular well-rounded warm meal since I’ve been depriving it from anything resembling healthy food all week long. Healthy food takes time to make, which there is none of during finals.

Also, to add to my terrible habits during finals, I put movies on while I paint to occupy my mind and I think I went through at least six movies this week and one book on CD. There were a lot of paintings to do.

And here are the products of my first semester learning how to oil paint:

I know, he has no eyes, which is kind of creepy but the class period ended before I could put them in, but I liked his pose and what he was wearing.

My desk in the middle of our living room after the last painting was done (and you can even see some of the movies on the floor that I watched while I painted).

I know, this is a very random sketch, but I kind of like the idea of it.

And now we are on the plane at this VERY minute (using the wifi for free because it's holiday season) on our way to Wisconsin for Christmas!

Some drawings and stuff

Some drawings from this semester's head drawing/painting class

Unfinished sketch

20 minute sketch

This post is about Adam and his accomplishments

The love of my life

Sometimes I ask Adam what I should write about on my blog and he usually tells me that I should write about him. “My name is in the blog address too!” Is how he usually backs up this argument. He says that I should write about him playing intramurals, but what exactly am I supposed to say about that? “Adam sure knows how to kick a soccer ball pretty dang well”-- yeah, I don’t know how well that post would go, I don't have a clue how to make sports sound fascinating.

Last year's amazing intramural football team

But this past week Adam did something amazing and incredible and definitely blog-worthy (not that playing intramurals isn't blog-worthy, but this is a little easier to talk about than intramurals). After three and a half years of attending BYU, one semester short from graduating, Adam Jones checked out his first ever book from the BYU library. He kept telling me that he “rented” a book from the library, which goes to show how often he engages is this sort of activity, because renting is what you do when you go to the video store. And he actually did not check out just one book, but NINE! Nine whole entire books.

The BYU library

Shortly after Adam and I got married I was at the BYU library, with the usual armload of books to check out and I ran into Adam’s good friend, Kurt, studying at a table.

Kurt: What are doing with all those books?

Me: Well, checking them out, isn’t that what you usually do with books at a library?

Kurt: Oh, I’ve never checked out a book from here. And I highly doubt Adam has either.

Kurt. An accomplished student in the highly-competitive accounting program at BYU

I was in shock. My husband had never checked out a book from the library? But sure enough, when I asked him he got this confused expression on his face, like “why would I do that?” My question is, how does anyone get that far in college without checking out a book? That is an accomplishment, to be able to get passing grades without ever learning how to even find a book in the library.

On the other hand, this is how nerdy I am when it comes to the library: for fun I will go to the "oversized book" section of the library. Do you know why they are oversized? Because they are jam-packed with loads of colorful, beautiful pictures of foreign landscapes and architecture, art work, or photos of big events or catastrophes or rituals in other countries (National Geographic style)-- it's so cool! I used to spend Friday nights in high school at Borders bookstore reading. I would stay until it closed at 11pm. To this day I drag Adam to the bookstore for occasional dates. Yeah, nerdy.

One day my life will be like this

I fill my journals with sketches of what I want my life to be like in the future. What I like about this is: it helps me realize what kind of direction I want my life to go in and then I can aim towards that. And it's just interesting to think about. I especially like drawing pictures of the little everyday events that might occur in my future life, things that might seem mundane when I actually get there, but right now seem so cool! And then by drawing pictures of those moments when they actually occur they won't seem so mundane because I'm living my dream! (Trust me, this is true, I've found after living several moments that I had drawn years before). I drew these pictures more than two years ago.

I drew this one on my 20th birthday and I was predicting my life in 7 years (my birthday was on Sunday that year and so in 7 years it would be on Sunday again, which is why we are in church in this picture). There isn't any husband in this picture because getting married was in the too soon future and I didn't want to try and guess what my future spouse looked like. I would meet Adam six months after I drew this picture. That little two year-old leaning against me with the attitude-- I want him! I can imagine exactly what his little stubborn personality is like.

This is another picture I drew around that same time. I realized that I was kind of at a crossroads in my life and I knew that whatever I chose would drastically affect my life in the very near future. These were the three places I could see myself in a year. The first one is me married (there is another person next to me with a wedding ring on in the first picture, in case you can't tell), the second is of me on a mission (I'm in a bunk with my suit coat hanging next to me and a Book of Mormon, and even mormonads on the wall next to my bed), the last one is me at BYU (that's a window behind me with the Y in view). On the side you can see that I said going on a mission was the most likely and getting married was the scariest option. One year from that drawing I was married.

And this is yummy:

Ultimate Hot Chocolate
Recipe from Our Best Bites

2 1-oz. squares of unsweetened baking chocolate
1 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk
4 c. water
1 tsp. vanilla

Directions here.

Gypsy children and purple nail polish

One of the coolest experiences of my life:

Between the tram stop and our apartment in Romania there is a gypsy camp. It’s not exactly the safest route to travel, because gypsy camps aren’t particuarly known for their security, and it’s kind of tucked back in this maze of alleyway-ish roads. Once while I was walking back there a taxi came through the alley, and I pressed up against the wall of the alleyway to get out of the way, and the passenger in the taxi reached out of the window and grabbed my arm as they passed by and tugged me along for a little bit before letting go, so it wasn’t the safest place. The funny thing is, stuff like that happened to us so often, it wasn’t until I was back in the states and reading through my Romania journals that I read that and realized how unsafe and how bad of a situation that could have been, but at the time it was just one of those things that happens on a daily basis.

The gypsy camp behind our apartment that we walk through everyday

So, we were walking through there and we saw these gypsy children drawing on the side of a painted van. We stand out as outsiders in Romania, and so the children of course started talking to us, showing us their temporary spiderman tattoos and sandals (the few of them that had shoes on). When we couldn’t understand what they were saying they would teach us new Romanian words to help us understand. I had some bright purple nail polish in my pocket that I had just bought for the kids at the hospital (they love having their nails painted) and so I pulled it out and the girls eagerly came forward, holding their fingers out for me to paint. Their little fingers were so grimy! After each painted nail we would exclaim, “Oh, frumoasa!” (Oh, beautiful!). This tiny little gypsy girl with big, solemn brown eyes, came up to me and held out her tiny infant-sized fingers all cover in dirt. I painted them and she held her finger very carefully in her hand, keeping it close to her body so that it would not get smeared. I showed her how to blow on it to help it dry faster.

(This is not the same time that we painted the kids' nails, but this is the same group of children)

(Football in the street)

As we painted the girls’ nails we could feel the boys patting our backpacks and back pockets for spare change or lose cameras, or anything else they could steal. Isn’t that crazy that these kids are trained at such a young age to steal? It’s their means of survival, begging and stealing.

(I love the clothes gypsies wear!)

Anyway, I think that was possibly one of the coolest experiences of my life, to get to paint the nails of gypsy children.

I am pretty sure this is a gypsy camp as well, but not the same one we walk though