Pretty, pretty flowers...

I enjoy arts and crafts. I like scrapbooking, jewelry-making, cross-stitching, and especially origami. I started learning origami from my Nai-nai (my paternal grandmother) and then from lots of books. I've missed crafting since being in NYC. Our little studio apartment doesn't leave much room for lots of crafts.

As we've been planning this wedding, I've been trying to think of ways to personalize the event and incorporate origami. My Nai-nai, who is a ripe old 90, also wanted to help out. Which means finding something cool with origami.

I was surfing the web (as I do) and came across a link to a tutorial on how to make Kusudama Balls - Japanese flower balls. It looked relatively easy (Part I and Part II) so I decided to try it out.

I used some random 3 inch origami paper that I had purchased in Chinatown a couple years ago and sorted out a bunch of colors. You have to make each petal separately and then glue each petal together and then glue 5 petals to make 1 flower. Then you glue 12 flowers together to make one ball. Turns out it was pretty easy, it just takes a while.

I started out by folding 5 petals at a time.


Then I glued each one together. I would put glue on one side, roll it together, and pinch it tight as I counted "one Mississippi, two Mississippi..."


Then I would let the petals dry as I folded the next 5 petals.


Then I would have an assembly line started. Fold 5. Glue 5 petals together. Glue 1 flower together. I got into a pretty good rhythm and it was something to do as I watched through a week's worth of the Daily Show and Colbert Report.


After finishing all 12 flowers, I glued 6 together to make the 2 halves. I tried to figure out a way to organize it so none of the same colored flowers touched each other. I don't think my visualization skills were advanced enough.


Look how pretty it is! To finish it off, I would glue a loop of ribbon to one half and then glue them together.


I showed the kusudama ball to my mom over Thanksgiving and she thought they were beautiful and would be something my Nai-nai could help with. Over Christmas, I showed my Nai-nai the ball and how to fold the petals. (We used napkins to practice.) She was very excited about helping out and talked about how she'd be able to fold all of the flowers. She even thought about asking her senior citizen center friends to help but decided against it because "they wouldn't be neat enough." :P

I found some jumbo value pack wrapping paper that should work pretty well. We'll use the balls as aisle decorations for the ceremony (hang them on the chairs right next to the aisle on every other row) and then for the reception (move them to the cocktail tables, place card table, gift table, etc.).

A Historic Day!

This is a retro blog post... I started this Election Day, but never had a chance to finish. Given that the Inauguration has already come and gone and the pundits are counting down Obama's first 100 days, I think I should finish it...


I love election day! I've voted every time since I turned 18, be it in person or via absentee ballot. There's something so exciting about making your choices and then pressing the button (or pulling the lever) to VOTE!

I don't remember where I read this, but it's always stuck with me - of all the principles of a democracy, the most basic and simple one is the ability to cast a vote. If you can't even do that, what's the point of a democracy? And given all of the people around the world (I don't have a percentage, but it seems like a significant number) who don't get a chance to ever a cast a vote or cast one without fear of violence - it's a pretty amazing opportunity.

I've never voted in NYC before so I wasn't sure what to expect. I've only ever voted in suburban Virginia at the local middle school. There were never any lines and you just drive up, walk in, check your name off and go vote.

New York City ("New York City!") was definitely overwhelming. I walked up 2 blocks to our voting center (the local high school) , turned the corner toward the entrance, and saw this...



Well, technically not this exact view since I took the picture after I got in line, but basically the line stretched across one city block (east to west) and was turning the corner down the next avenue right after I got in line.


Another shot of everyone waiting in line. No one was stressed out about the wait. People were chatting with each other and I listened to a mom behind me explain voting to her little 3/4 year daughter. At one point we passed the "No campaigning beyond this point" sign and sure enough, in front of the sign were a couple of candidates, talking to people.

Inside the voting booth. It's one of the old school versions where you flick the switch of everyone you want to vote for and then there's a long lever at the bottom that you pull to count your vote. The nice old gentleman who was volunteering outside my booth kept asking me if everything was okay. It was, it just took a bit to get my camera out to take the picture!


After getting to work, my co-workers and I organized a betting pool for the election. Our boss, who is Australian, can't vote, but was following the election closely, and wanted to do something involved with the election.

We decided to do a series of bets based on the swing states. Everyone had to call each swing state for McCain or Obama and the tie breaker would be the percentage (at first, just the whole number, but too many of us put the same number, so everyone had to go back and add a decimal guess) of the popular vote that Obama would win. We set the pool up this way so it wouldn't be about political views, but just how good everyone would be at guessing the stats.


Here's my sheet... Note we took 10 swing states and threw in a couple of extra ones, just to mix things up.


The night was a long one watching results come in. I was at FI's family's home and hanging out with his nephew, but also trying to watch CNN. I love those touchscreens!

Finally, around midnight, I got to hear McCain's concession speech and see Obama speak, which was pretty moving. I wanted to stay up longer to see more results, but I was too tired. Plus they were then onto Obama's potential Cabinet picks and I wasn't going to stay up for that. Besides, I wonder how accurate the list is now?


The next morning we went over the results of the bet, using the numbers from CNN. It got a little complicated trying to figure out the popular vote percentage because CNN wasn't counting 3rd-party results and we needed it to the tenth of a decimal point. But we managed to track down the latest vote counts and did some math to figure it out.

Turns out my friend who set up the pool won. And there was a tie for 2nd. So we split the cash for the 3 of them and then took the extra to buy bagels for everyone. A fun way to end Election Day!

Halloween Part 3: Party On!

To finish up Halloween (finally!)...

For the rest of the story, go to Part I and Part II.

After dinner, we headed to our first party at the Annex with one of our favorite bands - Paperdoll. They are a super talented group of musicians and play some super fun music, which is great for watching live and dancing.


The band in action! If you want to hear their music, go to Amazon, Myspace, or Itunes.


FI and I in full Amazing Race mode! We kept our headlamps on and pretended to be running down the streets as we were making our way to each party.


Since Paperdoll is 3 guys and 1 girl, they went as the 2008 presidential and VP candidates.


A picture of Teresa doing the Palin wink. I think I'm chanting "drill, baby, drill" or something like that.


I ran into an old friend from business school. Regardless of the occasion or theme, if we had a party that required dress-up, he would wear his cow costume. For our beach themed spring formal, he wore it with leis and was a beach cow. For our pajama themed party, he told everyone that's what he slept in. I saw the cow out of the corner of my eye and my first thought was "That looks familiar..." and it was...

After listening to Paperdoll's set at the Annex and hanging out for a bit, we headed over to another friend's office party in Brooklyn. We really felt like Amazing Race racers since we didn't have a map and were just running around the streets trying to figure out where we were supposed to go.

There were some amazing costumes.

Josh went as Iron Man. This costume is homemade! He made the battery for Iron Man's heart out of a salsa jar lid and LEDs. The Iron Man glove is made from random scraps and wires and he used red electric tape to make the finger joints for the glove. It was amazingly detailed and intricate. Check out how accurate he is. He even grew a goatee to match.

Our friend Calvin has been going as some version of an egg for the last couple of years. The first year, he was a plain egg with a yellow t-shirt under a white t-shirt with a hole in it and white pants. Then he was a Ranchos Heurvos, which was the egg costume with a sombero. This year, he was Eggs Benedict. We spent the subway ride home thinking of other possible costumes for future years. Western Omelet - wear a cowboy hat. Eggs Florentine - wave an Italian flag.


Our friend Sam went as Gloomy Bear. Which I know nothing about, but apparently it's very popular in Japan and is sort of the anti-thesis to Hello Kitty. That costume is all homemade except for the pink paw with claws. He bought a pink sweatsuit and sewed the bear ears and eyes and made the face mask and sewed little blood splatters on his outfit.

Our friends Danny and Judy came as Ravin Rabbids from the Wii game Rayman Ravin Rabbids. It's a super silly video game where the main character Rayman (who kind of looks like a psychedelic Warner Brothers character) has to escape a bunch of crazy rabbits by getting through a series of obstacles. The games are similar to ones in Super Mario Party and also childhood games like Red Light, Green Light. The rabbits are the enemy and they are pretty freaky looking. Judy captured the crazy rabbit eyes pretty well.

It was a long but fun night. I loved seeing all of the costumes and people dressed up. Our friends are super creative!

Halloween Part 2: Putting the Look Together (and extra)

To continue on our Halloween costumes, the day of Halloween...

I wanted to make fake Amazing Race clue envelopes for us to hold and run around with. My original ambitious plan was to also write real tasks inside the envelopes and have people open them at the parties we were going to and do the tasks.

"A Detour is a choice between two tasks, each with its own pros and cons. In this Detour, teams must decide to 'Shoot it up' or 'Drink it down.' In 'Shoot it up', each team member must do 1 shot of some kind of strong alcohol. In 'Drink it down', each team member must chug 1 glass of beer."

I couldn't think of many party/bar-related tasks, so I didn't end up doing this.

I looked online for images of the race envelopes to print out, but there wasn't much. I finally found some teeny-teeny images, like little internet icon sized ones, that I decided I would blow up and edit.

I used Powerpoint since I did this at the end of the day at work and it was actually pretty easy and the clues turned out really cute.



I first blew up the image so it fit along the page. Then I used basic shapes to redo the images so they came out sharper. The circle with the bar was made by 3 basic shapes - 1 black circle ovaled a bit and rotated slightly, 1 smaller red circle ovaled and rotated, and 1 black shape made with straight-line connectors. I just lined all of the shapes up with the original image and moved them front and back to get the right order. I also looked for a similar font to redo the titles as well.


To color the rest of the envelope, I basically looked for a color that matched the original image and did a filled shape over the rest of the page. I made 4 types of clue envelopes and also printed out a bunch of the Amazing Race flags. Note the slide sorter on the left.


Here are the completed clues! They looked pretty good! And fairly realistic if I do say so myself.


Here is FI all dressed up with his shirt, clues, backpack, and headlamp. Isn't he a cutie?


Here I am all dressed up as well. Note I am wearing the Amazing Race fanny pack. We borrowed a fanny pack from FI's dad and FI taped an Amazing Race flag printout across the front. While FI stored his clues in the back of his backpack, I put mine in the fanny pack.

Now you may be wondering why we have bits of foil on our heads and on FI's wrists, it's because we were going to Chipotle for dinner. We dressed up like burritos (basically wear some tinfoil) to get a free burrito from Chipotle on Halloween! You don't need wrap yourself in tinfoil, pretty much any bit will do and your meal is free!

The Chipotle employees were pretty tickled by our costumes and one even took some pictures on her camera phone.


FI enjoying his burrito and me enjoying my burrito bowl. While we were eating, we got several questions about the tinfoil on our heads. We happily explained about the free burrito and a couple of guys even "borrowed" our foil pieces to go back in line and get more food. :P

Next post, onto the parties and the great costumes we saw...

Halloween Part 1: Making Costumes

So this is a bit of a late post, but I still wanted to write about Halloween...

FI and I would be spending our 2nd Halloween together and we needed to figure out what we'd want to be. We wanted to do something fairly inexpensive, something as a couple, and something we could put together ourselves. Last year, we went as Hiro (from Heroes) and Betty (from Ugly Betty). FI keep his hair shaggy, wore glasses, wore geeky middle management clothing, and fashioned a Takezo Kensei sword out of a plastic ninja sword and a belt that he wore over his shoulder. He also ran around yelling "Yatta!" For me, my Betty costume consisted of a pair of red sunglasses (with the lenses popped out) and a fake mustache (that I cut in half) for bushy eyebrows and then the most bright clothing I had assembled into one outfit.

This year we decided to take inspiration from television again and go as competitors from The Amazing Race. We weren't going as a specific couple but the typical racer pair.

With that said, we knew we needed a few key items that all Amazing Racers had:
- matching outfits
- backpacks
- headlamps
- fanny pack with the Amazing Race flag on it (also known as the Amazing Purse)
- lots of Route Clues, Detour, Road Block, and Fast Forward instructions

Prior to Halloween, we made our t-shirts and tried out the headlamps.

We bought iron-on letters and t-shirts from Michael's.


The iron-on letters are very easy to use. You just peel them off the sheet and position them on the fabric.


We decided to go with our friend's suggestion for a team name - Amasian Racers! There weren't quite enough As so we had to improvise by using upside Us and Vs and cutting up an I to cross the modified As.


There are directions on how to iron, but basically an iron on a low to med setting works. You just run the dry iron over the letters until you can see and feel that they're really stuck.


Then we set up the headlamps. We tried to find headlamps at the local Modell's and Target, but they didn't have any. So we went online. FI found some relatively inexpensive headlamps on Amazon - the Wenzel Mini LED Head Lamp - . We asked Stephen to order 2 for us so we could save on shipping.


FI trying to open the package.


FI putting in fresh batteries.



FI testing out the headband.


FI testing out the headlamp. It is really bright. And even though the main purpose of the lamps was to flesh out our costume, they will come in handy when we go camping or do some ourdoorsy night activity.

Our final budget:

$ 13.68 - T-shirts (2), iron-on letters (2 packs) - from Michael's Arts & Crafts (FI also found a coupon online for 20% off 1 item per person, so we each bought a t-shirt and iron-on pack and save 20% on the iron-ons.

$19.98 - Headlamps (2) - from Amazon with no shipping costs (since Stephen had Amazon Prime)

Free - backpacks (our own), fanny pack (borrowed), TAR flag (printed), Paper instructions (Powerpoints that were printed)

Total cost of $33.66 - Not bad for 2 costumes!

Dumplings!

A couple of weeks ago, FI and I were in Chinatown, visiting a potential DJ for our wedding, and after the meeting was over, we went to Dumpling House to get some dinner.

We actually were at some other dumpling restaurant, but then were charging $4.95 for 8 fried dumplings. Outrageous! We left and found found our way to Dumpling House, where 4 yummy friend dumplings were only $1. Yeah, that's right, for the price of a Starbucks Grande Latte, you could have eaten 16 dumplings.


The inside of the restaurant. It's actually a lot nicer now. I think they just had a major renovation.


We were pretty hungry so we got 2 orders of guo-tie (the fried dumplings).

We would have gotten more had we not spotted the sesame bread sandwiches. Basically a round flat doughy bread covered with sesame seeds is toasted in the oven and it comes out all puffy, like the bread from Cosi. Then it's cut up into slices, like pizza and the inside is split open for whatever fillings are ordered.

We ended up getting 2 - the Peking Duck with cucumber (in the picture above) and a roasted beef one. The 8 guo-tie and the Peking Duck sandwich actually filled both of us up, so I was able to bring the other sandwich for lunch the next day!


To wash down all of the good cheap food, we each had a bottle of soy milk. This would have been true Chinese style if the soy milk had been served in little plastic bags.

A 2nd mea culpa...

Sorry for the lack of posting.... I was doing so well all through October, but then things got busy and kept me away from the laptop...

- Halloween (of which I do have pictures and am ready to blog about)
- Road trip to see the So You Think You Can Dance tour (which was awesome and I have the blurry pictures to prove it!)
- FI's brother and nephew visiting
- Election Day
- Road trip for my grandma's 90th birthday

While I'm busy writing up posts, I'll leave you with a funny conversation (paraphrased) I had with FI's nephew, who is a super-smart, super-confident, self-assured, arts-enthusiastic, 4-year-old.

Me: Did you like The Little Mermaid? (His grandparents, FI's parents, had taken him to the city to see the matinee.)
Nephew: Yes!
Me: Was it cool to see the fish and the water?
Nephew: Yes!
Me: What did you like best?
Nephew: Ariel!
Me: That's cool!
Nephew: I want to be Ariel for Halloween!

:)