My Summer Projects

The main one:
A few weeks ago, my sisters and I had a free Saturday where we got together many of our spare T-Shirts and turned them into cool new things - fringed shirts, bags, etc. Many of you know that for several years I served at a summer camp (Camp Wildflowers) that provides it's JCs with colored "Staff" shirts every year. I had enough Camp Wildflowers shirts to wear a different one each day of the week (7 different shirts). As much as I loved these shirts, there were some, like the orange ones, that I never wore, and I have several other T-shirts in my collection. So, on the day my sisters and I pulled out our T-shirts, I got the crazy idea to turn my Wildflowers shirts into a quilt.

I have this odd obsession with quilting. It seems like such a fantastic hobby (albeit a messy one) and I have helped to make quilts before, but never attempted one of my own. I've read a lot of books about quilting, from my first experience with it (the Addy american girl books) to my most recent chick-lit obsession (the Elm Creek Quilter series). Frequent readers of my blog will know that making a quilt was one of last year's new years resolutions, one that I didn't actually meet. I had actually sworn off handicrafts, saying my sisters could have them while I papercraft. Fear not, I am still folding flowers and animals and other origami gifts (I made my mother a flower for mother's day that involved a different piece for each petal). The quilt is definitely a practical thing, needing to find a use for these T-shirts and a project for my summer, so I'm experimenting.  In fact, I'm not even sure I'm doing it correctly, but I am enjoying it!

And the rest...
Another summer project of mine is experimenting with basic CS teaching tools (Scratch, Alice, Processing). My younger sister was just at Cyber Camp and has brought home a lot of cool toys to play with. I'm going to be TAing for an introductory CS/IS/CE course this fall with Alec, and so I'm learning about the various teaching tools for that (with particular attention to Processing since that's what we're using in class). It's a private dream of mine to not be a teacher, but to be one of those after school volunteers who raises interest in STEM fields, like so many of the people who worked in my life to get me to the place I am now. Speaking of camps, my other siblings are in Chinese language camp, so I'm getting the unexpected pleasure of learning a few Chinese words (like my numbers from 1-10) vicariously through their class, and some basic Chinese might just make it into next years resolutions. Obviously, if you read my last post, one of my summer projects is to continue to dance better. I have a fantastic partner and a great teacher, so there's no excuse for not improving my dancing! I'm not sure what caused me to put dancing on my list of new year's resolutions, but I did, and I am happy to have already fulfilled that resolution. My final summer project is, as always, to read! I've been enjoying two series so far this summer - Isaac Asimov's Robot Series and Jan Karon's Mitford Years. Very different genres, but I'm enjoying both. I hope your summers are as enjoyable as mine - for a bit of advertisement, my friend Liz is spending her summer in flute master classes, and is currently in Canada! You can read about her summer on "Adventures of a Flutist" at the right hand side of my blog.


PS - don't you love the layout change? it's bright outdoors, it should be bright on my blog :)