Books and T-shirst

It's been a great but busy week. I went to Chapel Hill for a couple of days to hang out and see Tim, who's been abroad all year, which was wonderful. It kind of made me wish I was there for the summer! But I'm also really excited about camp. We start tomorrow, which is crazy. It's such a huge change, I feel like my summer is either ending now or only beginning. The past two years of M-Staff have been completely opposite of each other but both were blessings in their own ways. I can't wait to see how this summer ends up; I think it's going to be awesome. 

I spent some time cleaning my room more and getting rid of some books I didn't want. The piles of books were getting out of control, and I knew there were some that I didn't want or need to keep. The basic criteria I was using was whether I would a) recommend this book to someone else and/or b) wanted to read it again one day. I figured there would be twenty or thirty books that I could give away; I ended up with one hundred and fifty. I had one hundred and fifty books that I didn't want. That is completely ridiculous. I'm so glad they are gone and I promise never to let it get that bad again. 

Here's the ones that were going:

My bookshelf looks so happy now! It's crazy to actually have extra space - I ended up putting extra notebooks on that shelf. 

Also, speaking of awesome things, Katy and I screen printed dinosaur t-shirts while I was in Chapel Hill. I was then inspired to create a llama one, of course. I love the way it turned out. I pretty closely followed this tutorial to figure out how to do it.

Bleach Dying T-Shirts

I love tie-dyeing! I've done a lot of different shirts, normally just white with colored dye. Today was the first time I've ever bleach dyed anything though. It was a lot of fun! 

I did it as part of a group activity with ArtHeels. We started by spray painting the word "artheels" on our tshirts, with ordinary black spray paint.

Then we rolled them up. I used a normal spiral pattern, for what I guess would be considered a "traditional" tie-dye pattern: the psychedelic swirl type thing. 

We didn't have any squirt bottles, so I just kind of dripped the 1/2 bleach 1/2 water mixture onto it with a paintbrush. To do the swirl, you dye alternating pie pieces different colors. You can use more/less bleach for a stronger effect. 

Some people splattered theirs, some tied and then dunked them. Since they immediately went to rinse them off, the bleach didn't completely cover it. 

The biggest thing is that you do have to rinse them off - with normal tie-dye you leave them sitting for a day, but if you do that with bleach it'll burn a hole through the fabric. I left mine for about thirty minutes the first time, but I didn't like the way it turned out, you could hardly see the bleach. 

I ended up retying it and then pouring bleach-water on it using a cup. Not ideal since I couldn't control it very well. I left it sitting probably thirty or forty minutes then rinsed it in the washer. Here's the final product: 

Pretty awesome, though I wish it was more evenly half dark/half light. Still, I'll definitely wear this!

I'd love to try bleach dying a black t-shirt then going back over it with colored dye; it seems like it would end up pretty cool. 

Curtains and hearts

This has been a pretty normal week. After the GRE I think my brain just wanted to stop working forever. But I'm going up to Virginia today to go to military ball with my boyfriend, so that should be fun! 

One thing I have accomplished this week is more room decorating 

(though I'm only going to be here one more month). 

I put up the curtains I got at Ikea last weekend; they didn't come with screws, 

so I had to stop by Lowes to get some. 

Before:

After: 

At night:

It's so much nicer; those blinds were pretty depressing. 

I also made heart bunting. It's so easy to do!

I just cut some hearts out of some scrapbook paper I had lying around (the blue heart below is the one I folded to make sure it was symmetrical). Then I took some thread and sewed them together, leaving enough extra thread so they'd be a little bit apart on the chain. 

So quick! I made it during an episode of House and it looks adorable.