I feel like everyone made friendship bracelets with their besties back in middle school. I remember buying all of the embroidery thread in all of the colors and tying knots over and over until I had a bracelet to give to all of my friends. I haven’t thought about making them in a while, but when my roommate, Emily came back from visiting her family over Easter, she brought back with her an entire bag fills with embroidery thread that brought back all of the memories of middle school.

The first bracelet I made was for my boyfriend because it was recently a 6 month anniversary of ours (if that’s even a thing lol). I took his favorite colors, black and blue, and then put a bead with the letter “J” on it. I was using the most basic pattern which is just tying a knot one way and then knotting the strings the other way over and over again until it is long enough to tie off.

This is a diagram I drew to try to depict how you tie the knots. You loop the blue string around the red string and tie a knot, then you tie a knot in the other direction and repeat.

After I finished the bracelet for my boyfriend, I wanted to make an anklet for myself because it is getting closer to summertime and I think that anklets scream summer. However, I wanted to challenge myself so I asked Emily to teach me a different kind of bracelet pattern. She taught me one where you use six strings and make diagonal lines. I think my diagram would be a little too chaotic so I will try to describe it. But basically, you have three colors, two of each, and they are next to each other all lined up. Then you take one of the strings and tie two knots around each of the other ones. Then you pick up a new string and do the same. You end up with a pattern like this one.

I wish I was better at explaining, but if you are interested, just youtube friendship macrame bracelets and there will be tutorials that make a lot more sense.

These are super easy once you get the hang of them and they are a lot of fun to make especially if you are giving them out to friends. The blue one in the picture above ended up being an anklet for my roommate and she is making one for me as well. It will be a fun reminder over the summer of the good times we had crafting with each other this semester. Plus a pop of color is always nice in the summertime!

Hi everyone! This past week, the HUB was full of crafting opportunities. I was sent an email at the beginning of last week letting me know that there would be an additional craft pick-up day on Wednesday, our wellness day! I was very excited to say the least. My roommate came back that day, so once she arrived, we went straight to the HUB to pick up our crafts!

Inside the bag were a little ceramic whale pot and a standard flower pot with some paints to decorate. It also contained a bag of soil and seeds so that you could plant some plants. I decided that I was going to paint little flowers on the whale, but I didn’t have a small enough brush to make the details so I ended up mixing together a blue and then adding white polka dots. In order to add the polka dots, I used the end of a pencil eraser and dipped it into the white paint so that I would get perfect circles. I was not steady enough to get perfect circles, but they were still better than what I could do with a brush so I consider it to be a success.

Then I decided to paint the flower pot to look like a watermelon. I had seen someone do it where they make the outside green and the inside red, so I wanted to make it look slightly different because I was too lazy to paint the inside of the pot if I am being honest. I ended up painting about 3/4 of the pot green using a dark bluish-green, a lime green and a white highlight. The remaining fourth, I mixed a pinkish red and added the black seeds so it looks like a little slice of watermelon. Then I wrote on the top “Watermelon” because I wanted to keep messing with it even when I knew I should just leave it alone.

I sadly lost the seeds that came with my craft bag, so I do not have any plants growing, but I am hoping to plant some when I get home!

The crafts did not stop there though, because Friday of last week, there were more crafts! My roommate and I went back to the HUB to pick up our bags. This craft contained a wooden sign that was separated into four sections and a little tray. I painted the sign with a mix of colors on each section to make it less flat and then I was off looking for a four-word quote to write on the sign. I am not the best painter, so I decided to play to my skills and do some calligraphy. The first quote I could think of was “Don’t worry, be happy” and I thought that was fitting because its getting very stressful as we are coming to the end of our semester.

Finally, I had the tray left, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to decorate it, so I thought I would ask you guys if you had any suggestions for me 🙂

This is what it looks like for reference.

I feel like 60% of the rooms on my floor have a white board on their door that they will use to decorate or communicate to the rest of the floor. My neighbors, for instance, will ask a question and take a poll of the answers. It’s always fun to walk by and see if people prefer pancakes or waffles or who they think is the craziest person on our floor. Others just have people leave fun comments or doodles. My roommate, Emily, and I have our names on ours and then we will find a funny quote to go with it.

Well this week, Emily went home to celebrate Easter with her family which means that I had total control of the white board. Normally Emily lets me do the writing because it’s something I enjoy and she claims to not have the best handwriting. However, she is always a part of the contents of the board because she is really funny and is good at finding quotes.

But because I had creative freedom, I went to Pinterest to find some inspo. I first started by figuring out which font I wanted our names to be in. I try to switch the font each week to keep things fun, haha not that anyone really pays attention or cares what font is used, but I think it’s fun. In the past, I have done cursive, modern italics, german, and a fun lowercase lettering. So I decided to do an uppercase font using different thicknesses and thinness to add some dimension. Then I went in and added some random floral/ foliage doodles to fill some space.

I then had to look for a quote, so I went back to Pinterest and searched around for a while until I found the perfect one… “Sometimes I talk to myself…then we both laugh”   I thought it was funny and accurate to my week because I’ve been going crazy without Emily. We normally do everything together so I have been bored waiting for her to come back.

This is the final result

I wish that I could’ve done this blog after Wednesday because the HUB is giving out craft kits from 3-5 for the wellness day, and I that would be fun to write about, so I guess stay tuned until then!

I hope that you guys enjoyed the white board and I would love to hear any suggestions on how to spice up the board or if you guys have any ideas I can do!

Hey guys, so for this week, I decided to be basic and do a very simple craft, doodling! These past couple of weeks, most of my floor came in contact with covid/ tested positive and had to go into isolation. Luckily, my roommate and I were able to avoid being exposed, however, we decided it was best to do some quarantining on our own, so we stayed in our room as much as we could and only left to get food, get tested for covid, or use the bathroom. This meant I was very bored. So after spending countless hours on Tik Tok, I came across this account that showed how to do simple little drawings of cute things.

So I took out my sketch pad and got to drawing. Now if I’m being honest, I am quite terrible at coming up with ideas or just drawing things from my own mind. I am not creative like that at all, but I am fairly good at replicating what someone else has drawn. So this account was perfect for me because the drawings were easy and fun. The first drawing was a picture of a strawberry on a bicycle.

She first started with a simple shape of the berry and then began to add the leaves, limbs, boots, seeds, and face. Then she drew the bicycle starting with the seat and moving down to the wheels and handlebars. After she was done, I took a screenshot (above) and began to draw. After I finished with the drawing, I took some watercolor and made it colorful because I thought it needed some.

As you can see, I copied it as closely as I could and then hung it up on my bulletin board :).

Next, I saw this mushroom cottage scene with little bugs and flowers and a snail who occupies one of the mushroom homes. The tik toker, @bobbiegoods, did a narration of what was going on in the scene as she drew it. I really liked that she did that and it made the process more fun because it is like you are adding characters to your scene. This is what she created…

And this is what I replicated.

Like the last drawing, I decided to add some watercolor to spice it up a little bit.

I would definitely recommend checking out her page if you would like to do some of these drawings. My advice would be that if you use a pencil to sketch out the drawing before going in with a pen, make sure that the pen/marker won’t smear when you go back to erase the lines because that can be very sad. I would also recommend that you make sure the pen you’re using doesn’t run when it comes in contact with water if you plan to use water color because that ends up with a black smeary mess, so I would suggest using a thin tip sharpie because those would bleed with water!

Here is her account if you all want to check it out!

@bobbiegoods