Halloween 2012 (part 1)

This post is long overdue since we're now about midway into November. My bad! I'm gonna make this a two part post, because there were a lot of Halloween festivities for me this year. I also threw a party so that'll be part 2 of the Halloween posting :)

The Saturday before Halloween, our ward threw a little dance party that was held in the Wilk on campus.  My roommates and I took pictures beforehand at our house (except for Kelsey who was doing other stuff before. Kels was a grandma with her bf--now fiance!!--Scott who was a grandpa. I was a flapper girl, Heidi was Amelia Earheart, Katie was a zebra, Meghan was a cheetah, Talya was a boy scout, and Carrie went as herself. ;) Oh and since I do face painting I painted Katie's and Meghan's faces--they looked great!

I made a lot of my costume. I found this gold dress at H&M for $7 (score!) and when I got it, it had a high-low hem and it was also sleeveless. So I cut off the bottom to make it all at knee length and then used the extra fabric to put sleeves on. I had some white fabric that I sewed on as a sash and then put elastic through to give it a drop-waist.

My favorite part, however, was my head piece. I made this all myself. I got some really pretty ribbon from joanns as well as the pearl strings, the feathers, and the applique and basically just glue gunned it all on. I looked for photos from the internet for inspiration, but I am super please with how it turned out! Oh and for the hairstyle, since I have fairly long hair, I curled it all into super tight ringlets and then pinned it up into a kind of of side bun. Basically I just love how my costume turned out. This was definitely one of my favorite Halloween costumes ever. :)

character poses!! ;)

And then it was off to the dance! Ever since freshman year especially, I've loved going to dance parties. And sophomore year I was a pretty regular member of the hip-hop club so  I learned some sweet moves there as well. Anyways, we had lots of fun! We danced hard and made new friends in our ward and went crazy.

Grandma and Grandpa (Kelsey and Scott) showed up! ;)

Roommate (plus a few others) jumping photo! My favorite part of this is Scott's walker jump haha

The ward dance ended at 11 and since it was the weekend and we're college students, we decided to go party more. There was a huge complex just a block away from where we lived hosting a huge dance party so me, Katie, Megan, and Talya decided to go, along with our friends Jared and Clark. It was insanity! There were a lot of people there and we kept running into a bunch of our old friends. We were right in the middle where it was a total mosh pit with people crowd surfing and everything. Whenever we started to get pushed over, the four of us girls would all link arms and just jump around so we couldn't fall over. We stayed there until about 1 in the morning when it ended. Good end to our pre-Halloween celebrations. :)

Ok so I lied at the beginning of this. I said it was going to be two parts, but I'm thinking it'll be three. We dressed up at work for Halloween and I was gonna mush that with this but this post was already a little long, so we'll make it a three part thing. Okay. Have an awesome Thursday. :)

DIY Spray Paint Tee

My roommates and I love making spray paint shirts whether it be for fun or as a lucky testing center shirt to wear for finals.

This was a year ago during finals

For the Hunger Games midnight showing we decided we wanted to make cool shirts. We could have dressed up, but we already did for the party, and it would have been really uncomfortable waiting in line in costumes, so we opted for the shirt making idea instead.

If you want to make a spray paint shirt yourself, here's how we did it (super easy):

We went to Walmart Wednesday night to pick up gold spray paint and black v-neck tees (we thought the v-neck looked cooler). We bought some $5 Danskin black t-shirts and just some normal gold spray paint. There were lots of different kinds but we just bought the kind that looked the coolest/shiniest ha. I made some templates for the shirts using this picture for the front and this picture for the back. I glued the pictures on some posterboard and then cut out the negative space to make a template. These were our templates (although they weren't gold when we started out and we did add the arrow to the mockingjay afterwards, realizing it didn't have one):

Then after you cut out the templates comes the easy part! All you have to do is place them where you want them on your shirt and then spray.

I'd recommend spray painting your shirts outside and/or probably on newspaper too. We did it outside in the parking lot across the street from us. If you want to make different designs like we did above, we used masking tape and just ripped it up and taped it on the shirts to make whatever designs we wanted.

My roommate Talya (below) put some masking tape on her shirt to make it look like flames. That's the best thing about spray painting shirts, is that the possibilities are endless!

If you are spraying both sides, do one side of the shirt, wait about five minutes and then turn it over and spray the other side. Then you can let them dry inside or outside, wherever you want, for about fifteen minutes to half-an-hour at the most and they'll definitely be dry by then. The shirts kind of smell like spray paint a little too, so we washed ours that night so they smelled nice and clean for the premiere. They faded a tiny bit in the washer (we washed them in cold water) but it worked out fine.

Once your shirt is done, you can wear it anywhere and everywhere! Obviously we wore them to the midnight showing, and they looked super cool and everyone was jealous. ;)

Front...

...and the back!

And of course a Hunger Games fighting/jumping pose! These shirts pretty much made us automatically cool :)

Have fun making your shirts!

Hunger Games Midnight Showing

Let me just say, that this was probably one of the most, if not the most anticipated midnight showing I have ever been to. I think it was the most anticipated for me, even more so than Harry Potter, because I wanted to see how everything was done and portrayed. I had no idea what it would look like!

My roommates and I decided to make shirts instead of dress up to the premiere, just because we'd already dressed up for the party and it wouldn't have been super comfortable to wait in line all dressed up, especially me wearing my Effie costume. So Wednesday night we went to Walmart and got black shirts and gold spray paint. I cut out a mockingjay stencil to put on the front of the shirts and then a District 12 one to put on the back. We live in Apt. 12, so we decided it would be appropriate to represent! haha. You can see the pictures we used here and here. The district 12 one was cropped from a photo like this. We went to the parking lot across the street from where we live and spray painted the shirts there. Don't worry, we've done it many times. ;)

The shirts turned out SWEET! We washed them that night so that they wouldn't smell when we wore them the next day.

Thursday night was the night of the big movie release! Oh man was I SO excited. I was seriously crazy at work and everywhere else because I couldn't focus on anything else. I was just was too excited for the movie. We went to wait in line at around 7 and since I had some free Chick-Fil-A combo meal coupons, Heidi and I went and got dinner for everyone while Talya and Stuart waited in line and the others got there. Once we ate all our food, we had some time to wait in line so we played poker (Texas Hold Em' style)! You probably don't know this about me, but I LOVE playing poker and the times I've played I've done pretty well (I just play with chips) and I totally wiped everyone out! Oh ya!

Heidi and me

We played poker for a while and were about to play Skip-Bo, until they opened up the theater at about 10:15-10:30 ish to let us go inside. We sat in the theater for a little while and took pictures...

Haha I just looked at this picture and realized the guys are on either end and all of us roommates (minus Olivia who didn't come) are in the middle. Cute. :)

Stuart and Talya had taken some pictures inside a photobooth so we decided we wanted to do and went out of the theater to take some pictures and also get some photos of our shirts. Man, I love my roommates. We had so much fun taking a gajillion pictures being crazy.

Then we went to the photobooth and got crazier...he he

We did two filmstrips and then we went online later to see the video it took of us in between pictures. Here's one of them, we were laughing so hard when we watched this later. We think we're pretty funny :)

You can see the other video here haha. After we did all that fun and crazy stuff, we had to go back to the theater because the movie was starting in less than half-an-hour. You can imagine our excitement! The movie started and basically....

I LOVED IT.

But that's for another post later. I have so many thoughts on the movie that I don't want to make this longer than it already is! But I am dying to get them out, so the post will come soon, like tomorrow or Tuesday (when I'm seeing it again!). Stay tuned! Did you see the movie? How did you like it/did you dress up or do something fun for it? Tell me! My mind is still in such a Hunger Games mindset it's all I can think about right now. So tell me all you want about it and I'll love you forever!

Seriously though, one of the funnest and best nights of my life. :)

Potter Fashion: a Bleached Pen Tee

My sister Carina made me this shirt with a bleach pen! Isn't it sweet?!?!!

Yes. Yes, it is pretty sweet. What is not so sweet is the fact that I have messy hair, am wearing no makeup, and pajama pants (because I was getting ready for bed when i remembered to take pictures). So just ignore that fact. Oh and also, you can see a bracelet on my right wrist in the above picture that Carina also made for me! It has my name on it. :)

Isn't Harry Potter awesome? And also do-it-yourself projects? Even better are the two combined! I would strongly recommend making a shirt as cool as this one with something as simple as a bleach pen! I am most happy and grateful for this shirt, so thanks Carina!

Oh and happy Wizard Wednesday!!! Say hello to the biggest Harry Potter fan in the world...he is pretty sweet too :)

Tutorial: How To Take in a Frumpy/Too Big Cardigan

So the cardigan I was wearing in the post yesterday and the one I'm wearing now is probably my new favorite cardigan! It's super cute and the perfect color, especially for fall. :) Buuut....I had to fix it first. I thrifted it, so it was a little big and didn't fit completely right and made me look baggy. I'm sure all of you have been able to relate to this at some point. Maybe you bought the cardigan and wore it because you liked the color and style but knew it really didn't look the best on you. Or maybe you saw it in the store, tried it on, and put it back because it just didn't look right. Or maybe you bought and never wore it. Either way, I feel like we all try on cardigans like these! So I've posted a tutorial on how to fix them and make them fit better!

Does your cardigan look like this and make you feel like this?

Then follow these easy instructions to fix your cardigan (and this can also work for t-shirts or dresses that are just a little too wide/big.

1. Take your cardigan and turn it inside-out, try it on and then either pin fit it (meaning you put pins on the spot where you want to take it in) or measure how many inches you will have to take it in to sew it on the side seams and arm seams

2. If you didn't pin fit it while on you, then take it off and measure how much is needed on each side and put the pins into place.

3. Get matching thread in your sewing machine and then sew along where you pinned the cardigan (it's still inside out at this point). See stitch lines below for an example of how I sewed it.

5. Turn it right side out and you're done! Easy right? And then you have a wonderful cardigan that fits great and looks like this and makes you feel like this:

I really do love my red cardigan so much more now after doing this and I wear it a lot more because it fits and looks a lot better! And it took me probably about 15 minutes. So go in your closet, pull out that too-big cardigan you never wear, and get sewing!! :)