ReCYcLe and ReDEsiGn

This post is for all of you that got excited about my recycle and redesign project :) For a depth humanities course I had to design an outfit out of recycled materials and then our class put on a fashion show on campus. The fashion show raised awareness about recycling as well as helped starving students by having admission to the fashion show cost a can of food per person. Over 800 people attended this year!!! ~The "model" and the "maker"~

~Shantel on the runway with other models~

My design was made from a $3 dress from D.I. as the base, arm-fulls of grocery sacks artistically stapled and cut to perfection ;).

and $3 worth of old vinyl records from the D.I. that I strategically tied together into a stunning train :) If you look closely, Shantel's jewelry and belt buckle are also made from vinyl records. This project turned out to be pretty fun when all was said and done! A lot more work than I thought it would be though...thank you husband for all of your help and support! The late nights drilling holes in records sure were memorable! hehe. And a big shout out to sis Shantel for being my model for the show, I got and 'A' :).

The runway story Shantel and I came up with to be read as she walked down the "T":

Vintage Vinyl

Come Sail Away in this vintage vinyl gown

That would make you a Juke Box Hero to any

Brown Dirt Cowboy.

Don't Stop Believin' that the records wouldn't stop

At the train. I have More than a Feeling that Shantel is sporting

A bowtie-record choker and vinyl bangles.

Good-bye Yellow Brick Road cause you'll be going

Over the Hills & Far Away in this gown at only six dollars!

This vinyl and plastic gown will definitely have you

Spinning Right Round, Round, Round on the dance floor

Cause It's Still Rock 'n Roll to Me.

Hoppy Easter!

Happy late Easter!! Couper and I realized we hadn't seen his family since the superbowl party (!!!) so decided Easter and conference definitely needed to be family time. Between school, work, and our calling this semester life has just swept us up and carried us away in a blur...it's been so busy! Conference/Easter weekend was the perfect time to relax, be spiritually uplifted and realize there is more to life than school ;). Unfortunately I've been the worst picture taker in the world and this is pretty much what we have from Easter.

It's tradition in my family to have the Easter bunny come on the friday night before Easter so that we can focus on the Atonement on Sunday morning, so the Easter bunny visited Couper and I in Logan on Friday night :). I...I mean the Easter bunny, wasn't quite as sneaky this year as last but there were still some fun surprises! :)

It's also tradition in my family to dye eggs for Easter. Couper and I didn't do it last year for some reason and I've been sad ever since :). So I told him I hoped his family was up to the task because we HAD to do it this year! ...Unfortunately the reason it's not much of a tradition in his family is because NO ONE likes boiled eggs!! (except Gregg :) ) Luckily they humored me anyway and Baylee and I had a fun time exploring our creative minds to see what kind of fun designs we could come up with. :) It was so much fun spending time with them!

Couper and I looked at our sunbeam lesson schedule wrong, so instead of teaching the Easter lesson the week before conference we were able to teach it today. I felt a little guilty not teaching the lesson before Easter, but I actually think it worked out better for the kids to teach it today because we were able to tell them how Easter wasn't actually all about the Easter Bunny ;). Among other things I used the story above to help tell the story of the first Easter (it's great for the little ones!). As most of you know we have quite the rambunctious little class of sunbeams and classtime needs to consist of multiple activities and object lessons in order to keep their attention and help them learn. I had had a hard time thinking of activities we could do that would keep the reverence of learning about the Atonement, and our classtime was cut short today. I decided I was just going to go for it, minus activities... It was amazing. Of course we had some normal distractions, but these kids were glued to me while I told them about why we really celebrate Easter. While Couper was helping them with a coloring activity at the end of the lesson I walked around the table to each of them individually and asked them why we REALLY celebrate Easter (rewarded with jellybeans of course). I was truly humbled by their answers, they had really been listening and whether they knew if before or not, they now know that Jesus Christ died on the cross to suffer for all of our sins that we may be saved. He was resurrected, and lives today, that we may live again. THANK YOU SUNBEAMS!

Spring??

I have a friend with a three year old daughter who in the month of March was forced to look out the window and see a blizzard after week of ..almost warm weather! She shook her head as she thoughtfully looked out the window and said "Silly spring, you turned to winter." Seriously mother nature, kind of a cruel trick to play on a three year learning about seasons!! :) I don't have pictures from April Fools, but after the first crazy snow storm covered cache valley and had practically melted away we woke up the morning of April fools to at least 6 inches on our cars and the ground...sigh.

-Good thing Couper is such a safe driver! He had to drive bus in all of the crazy weather!-

-sad to have to face the snow to attend appointment after appointment, study group after study group!!-

So, I don't think I'm superstitious. But, here we have our snow shovel on the front porch where it's been all winter. In the middle of March when temperatures reached 60 I thought to myself, "I need to get that shovel off the front porch! We won't be needing that until next year!" Day after day I thought that and we have had multiple snowy days since then...This last week I shook it free of water and dirt and placed it in a different location, and look what today looks like:

I appologize, it could quite be the presence of my snow shovel on the front porch that has been tempting mother nature to keep the white fluff coming our way. We'll see how my experiment pans out the next 2 months!!

Time Wasters :)

So this blog is completely random, which is fitting because I've been doing some pretty random things in my "spare" time. All of these little hobbies are an attempt to not stress out and get an ulcer this semester (...I've never gotten an ulcer, just pretty sure I've been close).

Our friends Trevor and Keesa told us about this AMAZING book warehouse here in Logan. I LOVE it!! I've only been a few times, but reap my rewards: I'm a huge fan of children's books and my collection is pretty weak. I found out about this book warehouse and jumped at the chance to increase my small stack of children's books. This huge stack of book cost me $10!!!! I'm not messing with you! Everything in the entire warehouse is $1 a piece unless you want to shove as many as you can into a plastic grocery bag, which in that case the entire bag totals $7. What a steal :). And I've been fortunate enough to go with a couple of pretty good bag stuffers! You know who you are. Anyway, there are books of all kinds at Jensen's warehouse just waiting to be shoved into a bag, so if you want to go and need someone to go with, give me a call :).

KEN: a friend I never really thought I'd be that close to, yet, we've found each other these last couple of months and our time together has been a learning experience and quite productive.

This Kenmore sewing machine belongs to my mother-in-law Denise, she leant it to me a few months back and I used it here and there, but for some reason I've been finding myself sewing up a storm the last couple of weeks. This sturdy hunk of metal has done wonders.

This is one of the random projects I've made for a few friends and family that have been having babies. It's simple and inexpensive! If you have a few squares of fabric lying around just make a burp cloth :). This is only one of the ones I made, but I thought they turned out pretty cute...even if I can't sew very straight, babies arejust going to spit up on them anyway right ;).

A few of my projects I can't blog about because they're gifts, and I don't want to chance the recipients seeing them :). This next picture is just a sneak peek at a project I've been working on that is turning out quite adorable! Even Coup told me it was very cute.

This picture looks like it was taken in the 70's, but I promise it's me and I promise it was taken last week.

PUZZLED?

Me too.

Coup and I decided to be puzzlers. We thought it would be a fun thing to occupy our time while the weather is still deciding if it wants to warm up or not, and it's an inexpensive activity to do together with spare time...

We expected it would take us a few weeks, but we successfully finished this puzzle 3 days (probably 8 0r 9 hours) later...hmm, don't know what to think of that. It was a lot of fun though. And we chose an awesome first puzzle!

Dad thought an overhead view would be cool :).

My favorite part about doing this puzzle was watching Couper. I never realized how much you can learn about each other doing a puzzle. (luckily it was a good thing in our case)

(Coup's going to kill me for this next little bit)

As you can see, the picture above shows that all we need is to enter the last piece and booyah. However, I got an urgent text from Couper while in class one day that read something like this: "Crap! The puzzle is complete but one piece, and it's the wrong one!" I was a little frustrated that we had purchased a faulty puzzle but we had actually had a few other instances where we had put pieces in the wrong places because they looked so much alike so I assured him it was the same kind of situation. He was positive it was faulty and guarenteed I wouldn't be able to find what went wrong. When I got home from class I went straight to the puzzle, glanced around for a few seconds, and found the mistake, it was legitimate, but I laughed for a good 10 minutes. Love you Couper! :)...( click to enlarge pic) can you see what piece is placed incorrectly?

February is short...

...which is why it's nearing the end of March and this post is a catch up for some fun things we did in February :o)

This absolutely breathtaking photo was taken by my husband on the Boulder Mountain. Coup was able to go on an ice-fishing adventure with his grandpa, and some uncles and cousins. He had an amazing time and had some well needed bonding time with his fam. The weekend he was gone my sister Jenni came and stayed with me and we had a ton of fun, and we had a sisters night with all of our sisters that live in Logan and worked on some fun projects...but we don't have pics because husband had the camera..but we have lots of fun memories! :)

Uncle Kurt drilling the holes for fishing!

Nice one! (doesn't it just look FREEZING!!)

Grandpa Bruce, none of this would be possible without all of his hard work..and incredible sense of adventure of course. :)

"It's so cold! But I'm so excited!"

Couper's 18 incher!! Way to go!!!

Couper and Jaden, guts and glory.

Grandpa Bruce in his element, love him!

The whole clan.

Couper and I have been able to go to some Aggie games! What the Aggie Student section at our mens basketball games!!! Kind of a blurry picture, but you get the idea! It is so jam packed at EVERY single game!! Definitely worth experiencing at least once in your lifetime. It gets so loud in there that an Audiology grad student I know decided to do some research on hearing loss within the spectrum. He tested several students' hearing before and after each game to see if there was any temporary hearing loss because of our rambunctious fans. (kind of like how when you come out of a concert and everyone sounds like chipmunks because your eardrums are ringing!) I participated for him after one of the games...but thankfully my hearing hadn't changed at all :).

(Where's Couper??)

Couper was sitting with our friends Travis and Brittany and Cody came up for the occasion to see what these Aggies are all about. Once Cody arrived at the game and realized the intensity of our Aggie fans he realized he shouldn't have worn his U of U baseball cap...hence the Aggie sweat rag on his head the entire game...haha!

My dad often gets free tickets from work so I sat with him at this game. It was actually pretty entertaining to be watching the student section instead of being in it!