The Best Halloween of My Life

This year was one of the best Halloweens I've ever had. And I'm being totally drop dead serious when I say that. 

I rarely look forward to Halloween. I'm really not a fan of all the spooky, blood, gore, monsters, and creepy that inundates all of everything. 

This year was different.

One of the girls I work with in the athletic training room loves dressing up on Halloween, and decided that we were all going to dress up like Disney villains. Her enthusiasm was pretty infectious, and I found myself more excited than ever for Halloween. 

We made plans for treats and costumes, and pretty soon we were well on our way to a fantastic pre-Halloween training room party, since Halloween was on Saturday this year.

I dressed up as Captain Hook. I originally started basing my costume off of the movie, but it soon morphed into a Once Upon A Time female version of Captain Hook. I had everything I wanted except for a hook, which Justin kindly volunteered to make for me.

Maleficent, Scar, Cruella De Vil, the human form of Ursula (Vanessa), Ursula, and Captain Hook.

We had tons of visitors all day, and we had the best treats. 

Us with the folk dance guys that come visit us a lot. [I may have missed the smile memo on this one...awkward...]

Amazing cupcakes that Brenda made.

Saturday was supposed to be pretty chill by comparison. I needed to study and do homework, and Robbie and I planned to practice later on in the day.

I did those things, but then went to the women's soccer game with my dad. When I came home, Clarissa was all ready to carve a pumpkin and watch movies. We settled on Harry Potter for our pumpkin (I carved the eyes and came up with the HP for the back, which I found online. Clarissa did all the rest, and it turned out fabulous!). 

We jammed out to great music, like old time Taylor Swift while we/Clarissa carved the pumpkin. At least I contributed some of the fun, right?!

 

We lit the pumpkin, and when we turned it around the the HP side, we realized that the candle inside reflected the face on the wall behind it! Definitely the coolest pumpkin I've ever done. 

We finished the evening off with a really creepy and really weird movie (anyone heard of the Lady in White?), which neither of us particularly enjoyed. But hey, we had to have at least a little creepy for Halloween, right?

Now on to Christmas, which we all know is infinitely better than Halloween. 

Happy Tuesday!

Nationals 2015: the Dress

I promised this blog post almost two months ago, and I'm finally delivering. This is what we started with:

I found the dress on Ebay, and I figured that we could make it pretty cool. I wanted to add fabric to the cutouts and rhinestone them, rhinestone some sort of pattern on the front, and use mesh fabric for the back.

Boy, did we have an adventure! We decided to sew a black leotard into the dress, which involved pinning the leotard to the dress while I was wearing it. Then we had to find sheer black mesh fabric, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Once we had all of the basics done, it was time to start rhinestoning! 

Naturally, we had no idea what to do. 

So, Mom and I started to lay rhinestones out. Once we decided on an idea, we needed to put the dress on the dress form. It was a lot harder than it should have been. We finally figured out that it was going to be a long night, so Robbie ended up coming over to help and we counted it as "practice."

Rhinestoning took a few late nights, but once we had a system down, we were on a roll!

To figure out the pattern, we decided to tape the rhinestones to the dress. 

We created a grid to get the big rhinestones in just the right places. 

It started coming together!

 The ribbon floats. We also did black satin gloves too.

The finished product! 

Oh, and how could we forget the shoes?

We decided that a little bit of bling on the bottom would be a nice touch. 

Thanks to my mom and Robbie for helping me create such a beautiful dress!

My creativity comes in the middle of the night.

Don't ask me why. 

All I know is that for the past week or so, I seem to hit my desire for creativity and emotion and all things deep and touching in the late hours of night/wee hours of morning. 

Even when I should be asleep, running low on sleep, or have to be somewhere early in the morning and have a long day ahead of me, it still comes. 

For example, on Tuesday night I had a burning desire to create some sort of slide show or video or something that captured raw emotion. I got as far as downloading Windows Movie Maker on to my computer and creating a folder of images I wanted to include until I decided it was time to move on to other things. That folder remains on my computer until I decide to pursue that raw emotion and finish the project.

My most recent blog posts have come about as a result of this sudden increase in my desire to be creative.

And tonight is no exception. 

This past year, I have learned a lot about my personality and what makes me, well, me. I've found it very interesting. And tonight, I decided that I was going to go through all of my dance pictures since high school and find the ones that I felt best captured what I've discovered to be my personality and my character traits. Don't ask me why, or what spurred this on, because I don't know why. 

Dance is emotion. It is expression. I have a coach who likes to say, "Devotion to the emotion equals motion." To go along with this, I looked up dance quotes on Goodreads, and these are some of the ones I've found. I've also included some of the pictures that I felt best caught my personality through dance. Credit for the photography goes to Hannah Gasinski (Hannah Liyan Photography) and my parents. 

 

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.” - Rumi

“Dance is the hidden language of the soul”  - Martha Graham 

 “To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking” - Agnes De Mille

“Dance for yourself. If someone understands, good. If not, no matter. Go right on doing what interests you, and do it until it stops interesting you.” - Louis Horst

 

 “There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.” - Martha Graham

 "When you truly dance, you dance yourself free." - Jay Woodman  

Hannah Liyan Photography

“I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man--the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.”- Martha Graham

“To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance.”  - Pina Bausch

  Thank you for indulging me in my creativity.

Who does that?

I thought about doing that whole cliche post. You know, the one where I freak out about how my freshman year of college is over and all the amazing things I learned and all that jazz. But I'm not. My first year of college was great. I grew up, met people, went to college, and I danced. (Oh and did I mention? I made back-up tour team!) But I don't know if I would want to read my own post about that, so I'm not going to write it. Maybe some other time, but for now this is all you're going to get. 

Instead, you get to find out about my life lately. On Friday, I moved in with these lovely ladies: 

Minus Megan (the Megan in the white and blue). She's got her own roommate now ;). 

 

This is Jessi. She's my room roommate, and she's fabulous :). We were actually in the same ward last semester, and it's been a blast so far!

And, I cut my hair. Way shorter than I originally planned. Also, bangs. Like, straight across bangs. The first day, I said I would never cut them like that again. They're growing on me though. I still don't know if I'll ever do it again though. I guess we'll see later!

I've been experimenting with cutesy writing lately. I found this link on pinterest that shows you how to do calligraphy-like writing (which just resulted in a 15 or so minute detour to said website), and I'm obsessed with it! I needed to justify using the envelopes that came with my stationary as I wrote missionary letters last night, so I ended up doing this and sending it with my letters: 

I should open my own Etsy shop, right?! Riiiiight.

What we do instead of homework

Some of you may have seen this post on Instagram recently:

I had a lot I needed to do that night (namely, read a 240 page book that was due the next day), but I was too lazy to cook dinner, so I went home. When my mom brought me back, I convinced her to buy me a bag of chocolate chips so that I could cover the strawberries she had just given me in chocolate. Reeann eagerly agreed to help me, so to get us started, I put the chocolate chips in the microwave for 1 minute. For those of you that melt chocolate, you know that is NOT what you do. The chocolate burned, and we had to melt the rest of the bag, which I had hoped to make cookies with. We had a bowl of burned chocolate left, and I got the bright idea to use it as war paint and paint lines on Reean's face. (Notice my little sister's comment above - "Mom goes and buys u chocolate and that is what u do... *crying smiley face* *crying smiley face*" You bet I did!) Once I painted Reeann's face, she graciously agreed to do mine. And then we took pictures.

 Here, while we were flexing with our chocolate war paint, "I'll Make a Man out of You" from Mulan came on the Disney Pandora station I had going. Perfect.

So, next time you need to waste some time, you have a lot to do, or you need stress relief, paint your roommate's face with burned chocolate and take pictures. #itsthecollegelifeforme

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I'm sadly lacking on life updates. So, prepare yourself for an overload of what's been going on lately.

1. I'm a brunette again!

It was kind of an interesting experience, in which I first became an EXTREMELY vibrant red head, and then a brunette, resulting in some very purple-y tinted hair for a couple of days. But don't you worry. Now it's more auburn on top and dark brown on bottom. I really like it. [P.S. I do have pictures of being red and purple, BUT.....I left my phone at my parents' house tonight, so I don't have them right now. Sad day. I know ya'll are dye-ing to see me with purple hair ;).]

Oh and my studly little brother finally got his Eagle Scout Award. So proud! 

2. Grandma and Grandpa on Dad's side got back from an LDS mission to the Kiev, Ukraine temple a few weeks ago! I'm so glad to have them back, and I got to have dinner with them today. And my favorite teeny-tiny purple mug from when I was little resurfaced again. Grandma is always hiding it from me, because I usually have to refill it 6-7 times to get a decent drink :).

My beloved childhood returns.

3. My other Grandma, my mom's fabulous mom, has been hounding me for pictures of my new apartment for quite some time now. (My previous apartment was torn down during Christmas Break.) So, you all get to see what it looks like too, and we'll take this slowly. As in, so slowly by the next time I get pictures up here I won't live here anymore. But it's a start, right?!

4. Last night, I got to get all fancied up and go to a dance with a Hunger Games' Capitol theme. We had a lot of fun with the make up and dresses, especially Reeann's.

Sorry Rachel, this is the picture that had the best quality!

At the dance, they also had several art students do caricatures. Reeann, Emily, and I gave our artist all the creativity he wanted, and this is what we got. From left to right: Emily, Reeann, me. We laughed so hard when we saw it. 

5. Nationals is this week! I'm super excited, especially to be competing smooth again. It will be weird not dancing with my high school team in medleys though. I miss that a lot.

Megan and I got our nails done in preparation :D

Best thing ever. I've seen this a lot, and it's so genius! No, I'm not going on a trip, but I will be using it to haul all of my ballroom stuff to, from, and around Nationals this week. So excited!

6. Slightly obsessed with this movie. I've now seen it 4 times. 

from papyrus.greenville.edu

7. Really ready for spring right about now. Enough of these fleeting warm-ish days. Bring on the heat and flowers!

8. I've decided I'm going to be more crafty and actually put my "Cutsy Crafty" board on Pinterest to good use. I came up with a list of things I want to try, and I'm excited to share them with you! Here's just a few things I want to do.

from ann-kay-home.blogspot.com

from classroomcollective.tumblr.com

from michelleandtucker.blogspot.com

9. New goal this week: I'm going to try to read the scriptures every morning this week, instead of at night. All I need to do is wake up 15 minutes earlier. I can do this, right?

10. Another new goal for this week: eating healthy. Especially with nationals and being at the Marriott Center 24/7, nutrition tends to slide. At least 1 fruit per day, and waaaaay less sugar! Guess that means grocery shopping tomorrow! 

Have a fantastic week everyone!