Allan & Danny

Twin Imagination

[allandanny]

sense8 finale spoiler but no context

[allandanny]

How we made our 2nd animated short

The first time we took a dive into animation was last summer. We drew and painted out every single frame by hand because we didn’t have knowledge about actual animation techniques or access to animation software. After gaining super cool and valuable animation experience from the Bordeline project during this past semester, we decided to uses these new methods to make another animated short! Our methods which we will specify below are still ioo (in our opinion… yes we made a new acronym as plural bloggers) are still super improvised and probably not the most convenient or accurate. What  we can say though, is it got the job done. Anyways, here are our steps.

Step 1: Think of an idea, and sketch it out.  This can be super vague… ours definitely was. And we ended up changing many aspects of the initial sketches later on, but nonetheless it really helps having an initial outline.

Step 2: Make the backgrounds.  This can be done with any medium (traditional or digital), but we just adore the aesthetic of hand made backgrounds. See "out of sight" (from our assumption, those backgrounds looked watercolored, unless the creators used some digital art sorcery). So we made our backgrounds with acrylic paint and pencil.

Step 3: Making the scenes. 

The software we used was Photoshop. To our surprise, someone showed us (the AR lead of the Borderline Project) that Photoshop has an animation timeline that is actually very easy to navigate. Software was actually a huge barrier to us getting more involved in animation during our freshman year, before we did the borderline project. If the software was free, it was super glitchy and hard to navigate, and if it was acclaimed to be intuitive to use by online reviews, it was expensive. This was actually a big reason (on top of workload) why we had to stop attending animation club in the spring semester (now that we have a method to animate, hopefully we'll start attending meetings again in the fall!) Photoshop is both affordable (10 dollars a month) and easy to use for animation. It probably isn't the best out there for animation, but we think it worked fairly well for us. It doesn't have features such as onion skinning, though turning on two layers at the same time is almost exactly that. Anyways back to step 3. We opened a new Photoshop file with scans of the backgrounds we made, then clicked on the three squares in the bottom left corner to turn the video timeline into an animation timeline. (That icon is no longer visible in the picture below because we had already clicked on it, but it would be located on the left of “once.” )This timeline let's you add new frames and you have control over which layers you want to be visible on each frame.

Step 4: Animating.  We used a Wacom Intuos tablet for this. Once you get into the swing of things, the animating itself is really fun. Frequently we'd need to ask each other to strike a pose for a reference or for help with a particular frame. We'd also need to use the internet to see how the actual world looks like. Because you think you know how something looks until you actually sit down to draw it. So our YouTube search history was largely "baby swimming," "child jumping into pool," "pool water," "toddler walking,” etc.

Step 5: Exporting scenes Once a scene was finished, we would export the animation video. File>Export>Render Video.

Step 6: Compiling  We compiled all of our scenes into iMovie. Here we did minimal editing. Basically we made sure the black bars around the film were the same for each scene, adjusted the speed of the different scenes, and then, of course, added the music and sound effects.

Step 7: Exporting the animation!  That's it! We're super happy with this experience! It took countless hours. We worked on this from the middle of June until now and worked on it almost every day for at least one hour (most days we spent multiple hours), but it was definitely worth it. Here is the final product!

[allandanny]

We made our second animation! 

[allandanny]

How to Make Медовик (Medovik - Russian Honey Cake)

This is our absolute favorite Russian dessert. We’ve wanted to make it for so long, and we’ve finally gotten around to it this summer (we actually made it more than a month ago, we just never got around to posting this untill now >_<’)! We used AllasYummyFood’s recipe as a guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTQTDBg4CS8

Step 1: Make the dough. This step was very stressful because it involved mixing many ingredients that can burn easily on a stove. (so we weren't able to get pictures for this step :/) Melt 1 stick of butter with 3/4 cup of sugar and 2 teaspoons of baking soda on a low-medium heat. Decrease the heat to low and then add in 2 eggs, while whisking so the eggs don't scramble. Add 1/4 cup of honey. Whisk for 5-8 minutes until the dough darkens in color to a golden brown. Take your pot off the stove and mix in 3 cups of flour. Take the very sticky mixture on a heavily floured surface and mix it until it is no longer sticky, but still very soft.

Step 2: Roll your dough into 9-12 balls. Let the dough sit for 30 minutes in the fridge.

Step 3: Roll out the dough balls into thin circles on the back of a backing tray. Use a cookie cutter or a plate to make them more even.

Step 4: Bake each circle 2 at a time (or however many you can fit in your oven (preheated at 400 degrees F)) for 2 minutes (check on them frequently because they burn in the blink of an eye). Make sure to bake the scraps of dough as well.

Step 5: Admire your delicious and time consuming layers (p.s. the slightly darker layers are not burned, but also not ideal because they were crunchier than we would've liked. So as soon as you see the layer slightly golden brown take it out of the oven.)

Step 6: Make the delicious cream by mixing 8 ounces of cream cheese, 8 ounces of sour cream, 1 can of condensed milk, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and 10 ounces of whipped cream (homemade or bought). 

Step 7: This is the best part!  Assemble the cake! Get a pretty plate, put some cream on the bottom and then place your first layer down. Cream, cake layer, cream, cake layer. We actually decided to make two cake of 6/5 layers each, but one giant cake of 12 layers can work too! In terms of how much cream to put between cake layers, if you think you put too much, add more. We literally thought our cake layers were swimming in a pool, but after a day in the fridge the layers absorbed most of the cream, and our cake turned out surprisingly  somewhat dry.

Step 8: Decorate your cake by crumbling those cake scraps we baked off earlier (if you haven’t eaten all of them yet... we literally ate 95% of our cake scraps by the time we got to this step lol). 

Admire your beautiful cakes! And off course eat them!

[allandanny]

How to Make пельмени “Pelmeni” (aka Russian Meat Dumplings)

1. Dough. Mix 100 ml of water, 100 ml of milk, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Then add this wet mixture slowly to about 4 cups of flour in a stand mixer. Knead the dough by hand after for about 5 minutes. Then wrap in plastic wrap and place in fridge for 20 minutes. 

2. Filling. Since we don't really like working with raw meat, we solicited our mom’s help (whose hands are featured in this next picture). Mix 1 pound of your meat of choice (pork and beef are the most common, but we used chicken) through this meat grinder attachment. Mix 1 onion and 2 cloves of garlic though the attachment. Then mix in 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 of pepper in your bowl. 

3. The optional, add finely chopped dill.

4. Prepare your station for pelmeni making

5. roll out the dough and use a shot glass (or that sized cookie cutter to make small circles. The picture shows our first attempt of using bigger glasses, and this resulted in pretty gigantic pelmeni.  

6. Put a little filling in each circle and fold them in half. Seal tightly and then make this cute shape, by twisting the corners together. Again, featuring our moms hand. She had to teach us how her grandmothers taught her. 

using the bigger glasses results in this:

using the shot glasses results in this:

7. Boil water. Drop about 15 pelmeni in at a time (depending on the size of your pot). Just make sure they aren't too crowded. 

8. They should be done about 5 minutes after they float to the top. You can check by taking one out and cutting it open to see if the meat is fully cooked.

9. Plate by sprinkling with dill and/or putting little piece of butter on top. Traditionally, these are eaten with sour cream and a little vinegar, but they are also just as enjoyable like this!

[allandanny]

Augmented Reality animation for Danny’s Borderline Mural!

[allandanny]

Augmented Reality Animation for Allan’s Borderline mural!

[allandanny]

What even happened during Spring Semester?

This semester was honestly the most intense educational experience we have ever had. We dedicated so much time and mental energy to all of our technical classes, project-based classes, and our outside commitments that towards the end, it felt like we didn’t have any time to even breathe (or sleep very much tbh). There was a pretty clear split though from pre-spring break to post-spring break in terms of work load/things happening in general. If we compare our semester to the timeline of a hurricane, Pre-Spring Break was when the sky began turning gray and clouds began forming. Post-Spring break was when high-speed winds of deadlines and pouring projects began.

Classes Overview (the rest of this post will reference the class numbers):

1) 8.02 – Physics II. This was a very not fun class for us, since we really don’t like physics. It involved weekly psets, and being tied to Sunday office hours. In the end we both passed and are super happy it’s over!

2) ES.7013 – Biology (taken through ESG). This class was better than 8.02 since we took it through ESG, so we got more one-on-one attention from the teacher. That was really nice.

3) ES.333  - Production of Educational Video – The goal of this class was to make, as the name of the class implies, an education video. It was extremely time intensive, but very rewarding. Here are our videos (Allan) (Danny)

4) 2.00b – Toy Design – In teams of 5 (we were on different teams), we had to make a toy! Again, very rewarding and very time intensive, especially towards the end.

Allan’s 5) 21M.601 – Drawing for Designers – This class was a very relaxing and nice life drawing class!

Danny’s 5) 4.520 – Visual Computing – This was a pretty cool and somewhat hard to describe class about rule-based design.

 Events of Pre-Spring Break:

This was us. The first half of a semester usually has a slow start, but the weather made this spring semester’s particularly slow. We had 3 snow days! In terms of work, we had 2 8.02 exams, 2 ES.7013 exams, and our project classes weren’t that intensive, mostly involving lots of planning.  Edit: after reading this, we remembered that we actually did do blog worthy things during this time of the semester! We hosted a knitting workshop in Next House, our dorm, and taught a knitting class through SPARK! (for both, we wore these babies during the whole thing) We also participated in the calling campaign to congratulate pre-frosh, and got some interesting pub .(haha) Also, since one of the snow days was on Pi-Day, we were able to bake all the pies with our friends!

Events of Spring Break 

IT WAS WONDERFUL. We went back to the warmth of Florida, and just soaked in beach water for hours each day. We also met up with high school friends, which was really nice! And we met new high school friends (who will now be college friends!) at a local admitted students gathering! That’s about it :) 

Events of Post-Spring Break

Campus Preview Weekend (CPW)!

This was so incredibly fun! We hosted so many events from art club to rainbow lounge events, went to so many parts of campus, and talked to so many pre-frosh! One of the days, we had events (some hosting, some attending) back to back from 11am-4am.

Some highlights of CPW:

-When we were walking back to next house at 4 am, we saw a friend (who happened to be a senior) walking out of his dorm, and just casually said “hey guys! Good Morning!” We hope we do not turn into that type of senior.

-During the activities fair, which is the time when pre-frosh get a preview of what activities exist on campus, we met one person that one of us (allan) spoke to on the phone in the calling campaign! It was a really fun coincidence!

-Throughout the weekend, we got the comment “Are you guys THE twins?” multiple times. Apparently the pub we mentioned above was posted to the 2021 facebook page. Every time we got this comment we awkwardly laughed, but it was a pretty good conversation starter.

Ring Committee

This is the committee that designs the iconic brass rat for each class. We both applied to be on this committee, and one of us got it (Allan)! This worked out actually because Danny’s fifth class was more time intensive than Allan’s, so this balanced things out. Ring Comm has involved having a couple meetings so far where we discuss and plan many many more things than excepted, including making a logo, website, getting venues, planning events, getting food for those events, planning study breaks, deciding our public image as a committee, and much much more!

The Borderline Project

This was incredibly mega super duper cool and we are super unbelievably happy that this happened and that we were a part of it! Basically this was a project that let essentially anyone who submitted a sketch to paint a 5x8 foot mural in one long expanse of one MIT tunnel. On top of that, 6 of the ~34 murals ended up having augmented reality animations (ours were 2 of the 6!). Something that was also super duper cool was that we basically witnessed the birth of this incredible project and idea! One of the five project leads did the OpenMind::OpenArt project with us, and she was discussing this idea during our weekly meetings in January. So when we got an email from her a couple weeks into the spring semester about this actually starting, we were super stocked! We ended up painting our murals the weekend after CPW in the span of about 12 hours. It was so cool because at that point, very few murals were painted, and since we’d periodically walk through the tunnels, we’d see people painting and making progress and just filling up the wall! We ended up doing the animations for our augmented reality component weeks later with a friend who is more tech savy than us. We did all the frames for the animation, and then we had a 5 hour meeting with our friend where we meticulously timed and complied our animation in Unity! It was time intensive, but so worth it and fun! We’re really happy we had that experience, and are honestly interested in continuing exploring augmented reality/virtual reality now! The opening night of the tunnels was also soooooo great! It happened really close to finals week, so it was a great distraction! It was also really nice because we hadn’t seen many of the artists, since we were all assigned different weeks to paint, so this was a cool chance to meet the people behind the amazing art! The amount of exclamation marks in this paragraph is a pretty clear indication of our level of excitement for this thing that happened! here’s a (partial) group photo! 

Art Club (and specifically fixing its debt)

We started being part of Art Club Exec in the beginning of Spring Semester, but it was pretty chill before spring break. After spring break though, we found out that Art Club was actually put in debt accidentally by the old exec team (basically they took money out of the wrong account), and now it was up to the new exec team to fix it! The process of fixing it involved rasing a third of the money we were in debt by through a bake sale, and then sending some emails back and forth culminating with a very apologetic one that sealed the deal to get Art Club back to a balance of 0. This took the span of many weeks to organize and figure out. Also, the Sunday night that we were baking was an utter mess for many reasons, and we will list them out because we think its pretty funny just how many things went wrong. definitely not our finest baking moment:

1.The drainage in the sinks in the next house kitchen were broken so the water filled up in the sinks.

2.Right before we started baking, a pretty large “Next Iron Chef” contest started, which involved many people running around and using supplies we needed. They also made the sink much grosser than they had to be. So, we’d have to leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom to clean everything, and we are lowkey clean freaks so we made many trips.

3.The hand mixer we were using didn’t mix the flour well enough into the batter, so for about 40 minutes, we had our four hands (they were mega clean, don’t worry!) in the batter bowl taking the flour clumps out.

4.After the first batch of mini muffins came out of the oven, the ones in the metal tray were stuck so we had to cut them out with a knife. After that we decided not to use that tray anymore, so it took about 5 or 6 more batches to finish baking everything. We were in that kitchen until 2 freaking am.

ESG Yearbook

ESG, or experimental study group, is a fancy name for a community of 50 freshman who spend there time eating, bonding, talking, pseting, taking GIRs in smaller class sizes (of 4-12 students),  and being awesome on the 6th floor of the very hard to find (due to construction of the new nano building) building 24.  We innocently volunteered during fall semester to be in charge of making this year’s yearbook, not realizing that the majority of the work would get done 3 weeks before the deadline and during the super duper busy time of post-spring break. Nevertheless, it was mostly fun to make it! We used shutterfly though, which at times could be frustrating. And when we say “at times,” we mean specifically that shutterfly doesn’t allow you to change a style without ruining all the layout you already completed. So, basically after finishing the entire yearbook unknowingly with a style that would cost people an extra $6 (our fault for not checking this), we had to change the style, and thereby have to start from scratch. So essentially we made 2 yearbooks. In the end, we actually liked how the cheaper one looked more...go figure! This is one of our favorite pages:

Art Scholars

This is a program that brings together graduate and undergraduate students who have a passion for the arts! We get to go on outings throughout the year and get to know awesome people! We applied this semester and we got it! During the interview, the person who runs the program said “this year there were 16 applicants and 16 openings.” It was very cool haha.

FAP Counselors

We applied to be Freshman Art Program Counselors! And we got it! This is especially exciting because due to scheduling issues, we were unable to actually participate in this program as frosh, but now we get to experience it by being counselors! We are super stocked to pass on our knowledge of MIT art opportunities to the frosh and generally be mega artsy for a week in august before school starts!

Declaring our Major

This was a very confusing for us. The majors we were considering were 2 (MechE), 4(Architecture), 6-3(Computer Science) and CMS(Comparative Media Studies). The way we were making sense of these majors was that if we choose that we want to make physical things that look good (as in products mostly and abstract sculpture/conceptual design), then we would choose to combine 2 and 4 in some way or another. And if we choose that we want to critically study and make digital media (including exploring VR/AR more and just generally understanding computers better) then we would combine CMS and 6-3 somehow. Through many discussions, we discovered a major that would allow us to combine 2 majors, which is super convineint because both options involved us doing that! So, this major is called 21E (humanities and engineering). It allows students to choose a humanities field and an engineering field and then mesh them together. After much consideration of what we found fun this semester (which was really difficult, because we found many things fun), we both decided that we each wanted to go with 21E, doing CMS for our humanities and 6-3 for our engineering. This is honestly still subject to change, but this is the decision that feels most right right now.

Finishing our Videos for ES.333

Video editing is so incredibly time consuming. Finishing this video involved spending multiple nights in the computer room in ESG (since we don’t have FinalCut Pro on our laptops) until 1-2 am. This was a very sad existence when we were still in that room when all we wanted to do was sleep, but in the end it was worth it!

 Finishing our 2.00b projects

If we thought finishing our video project was hard, this was harder by 10 fold. It is incredibly good that ES.333 finished before the final crunch for 2.00b started because we wouldn’t have been able to do both at the same time. For 2.00b, each of the last four days before playsentations involved literally staying in the lab from 11am-5pm and then spending extra hours in our dorm (until 11pm-1am) just working to get our toys finished. Then the day of playsentations (Allan’s starts 1:21:00, Danny’s starts 2:03:00), we had to rehearse all day for our skit. Somehow, both of our awkward totally non-actor selves ended up in the skits for our teams. But in the end, many people said we were pretty good! Yay! Despite this, many things actually went wrong right before/during the presentations. For Allan, water guns started leaking 30 seconds before going on stage so extremely fast duck taping was implemented, and for Danny, water was sprayed when it wasn’t supposed to be sprayed so improvising was implemented. (somehow both our teams made water-related toys…the twin is strong within us) 

Buying tickets to Natasha, Piere, and The Great Comet of 1812!

We bought tickets to see our current favorite musical on broadway. We are going to see it with a friend at the end of August right before going back to campus and we are sooooo incredibly excited!

Sense 8

After our last final, we went back to our room and spent 10 hours watching 10 episodes of this freaking masterpiece of a show. If you have free time this summer, and you want to be blown away by mesmerizing visuals, an incredibly cool concept that also translates to a beautiful metaphor, awesome action pact scenes, badassary redefined, ships you cant help but ship, amazing representation, and absolute authenticity, please watch this show!

ending thoughts

Now we are in Florida, mostly recovering from a super hectic and busy semester. We are really happy with what we accomplished during our freshman year, and are looking towards next year, but right now its great to just float in hot sea water and do absolutely nothing else.

[allandanny]

MURALS --- a quick post in the hectic weeks before the end of the semester

we made wall murals for a project called BORDERLINE... We spent about 12 hours painting our respective murals

“Abyss or A bliss” by Danny

“Cats Cradle” by Allan

AR/animation components for these murals to come and a detailed blog post to follow

EDIT: new pics for murals (thx Iris Fung!). Also added many links to this little description.

[allandanny]

OpenMind::OpenArt - a student gallery project themed in mental health and wellness

A long belated update summary of the favorite thing we did in January and how it ended wonderfully in the second week of February.

Just for reference about the steps we took to make this project, it involved sewing tiny pieces of fabric together using drawing we made as references: 

After doing this process for about 100 hours in January, we got to this step and had written a blog post about it. At that point all we had left was to mount our finished piece onto foam core. 

Well that's what we did, but the way we wrote it in the post and the way that we thought it would happen -- "oh piece of cake" -- was not at all how it actually happened.

We'd love to have pictures of this feat, but no one was around at the time...ow well. Anyways, the reason it was such a feat was because it took all four of our hands. The foam core we bought was sticky on one side and we being our (read next words with sarcasm) brilliant selves decided to remove the sticker backing all at once. So we had to position this piece of fabric onto the foam core PERFECTLY in one try (because #protip felt actually sticks very very strongly to the sticky backing of foam core).   We ended up getting our piece on the foam core decently on since we took literally 20 minutes getting it in the right place before committing to attaching it. We did however have some air bubbles that we had to fix. So with much much force (and much much fear and anxiety) we had to rip our piece (which mind you is hand sewn pieces of felt, in other words, fairly weak) off this foam core. Then after smoothing out our piece and getting rid of all the air bubbles, our piece was finally done and ready for display!

That was two weeks before the opening. In those two weeks the entire team of artists, makers, and directors had to literally transform an ugly little room into a gorgeous art gallery. We did the best we could to help out by coming in a couple times after class to help paint paper that would cover up construction signs (because conveniently the bank next door was being renovated). There was a very long and cool gif of the people working on the project! We can't find it now, but it was cool nonetheless!

Now, onto the opening night! We were very pleasantly surprised by the fact that the gallery actually extended to the entire first floor of the student center as oppose to just that little room. There were soo many cool exhibits! To name a few, an emotion/face recognizing software, a dress that projected moving images/gifs, a beatboxing showcase, and a yoga workshop! Here are some pictures of us at the opening night and then of our piece! So many of our friend came and it was so great!

We were so happy we were able to make our mark in the project and that it was for such a great cause! For more read these articles!

[allandanny]

HAPPY PI DAY!!! It was a snow day today, so we got to make these beauties with the Next House (our dorm) Baking Club, aptly named, Next-Bake! It was so fun and they were delicious!

[allandanny]

Our First IAP

Independent Activities Period. This is a time at MIT most students would describe as “chill.” Most people sign up for a fun workshop or a fun class or just work on a project. We did all three, thinking we’d also have a chill IAP. But due to a series of fortunate events (they were all very fun, definitely not unfortunate!), our IAP turned into a busier time than our fall semester (which is saying something, because we took 3 super technical classes in the fall). 

Event #1: 8.01L is actually 8.01HelL

This is the longer version of physics that extends into IAP for students, like us, who have had a less than strong background in physics. This class took up SO much of our time during IAP. Besides the weekly PSETs, we had our 4th exam and a final to study for, and a project. Nothing about this class is super blogworthy, except for our project. The assignment was to make a two page report and an optional video on any physics concept that we learned throughout the semester. We, being the anime nerds we are, decided to make it Yuri on Ice themed. Just watch this, and you’ll understand. This was actually pretty fun for a physics assignment!

Event #2: 4.100, Our cute little 3 unit class that we signed up for ended up taking about 15 hours a week.

But before we get into the time consuming part of this, an anecdote: We signed up for it thinking it was called “Architecture Workshop: Form and Fabrication.” And we saw the name of our professor was P. Pedigrew (as in the Harry Potter Character.) We told one of our friends about it and we all laughed at the coincidence. It was even funnier when we found out that the name of the course was actually Lumos Maxima (it must of changed after we signed up for it) from a flyer we saw randomly hung up in the Infinite. It went something like “Oh cool!  A Harry Potter themed class! We should sign up for that!” Then we came closer to the flyer, and saw that it said the class code was 4.100. And we were like “wait we signed up for that already haha. Our teacher must be awesome, but the ‘P’ probably doesn’t stand for Peter. That’d be too perfect” We were right about both (his name is Paul).

Anyways, this class was basically a lamp design and building class (hence the light spell as its name). We learned how to make 2D and 3D models in the program Rhinoceros (Rhino), how to use a laser cutter, and how to think like designers. Though the design process is very time consuming, from sketching to mocking-up to critiques to repeating the process, we absolutely loved it! 

This is Danny’s final prototype: 

This is Allan’s:

Event #3: We participated in a project called Open Mind::Open Art and choose (we did this to ourselves) to make our art piece super meticulous and time consuming.

So what is Open Mind::Open Art (OMOA)? This is a project under the Mind, Hand, Heart Initiative at MIT (an effort “to enhance mental health and overall well-being at MIT”). OMOA’s goal is to have 10 student Artists (2 of which are us) and 10 Makers to make a gallery with the theme of mental health and wellness.

We had total freedom to make whatever art piece we wanted, and what do we choose? To make fabric art. It is basically a collection of 6 portraits, each with an empathetic expression. Each portrait took from 12-15 hours. We each worked on 3. So essentially we worked on this project for 45 hours, plus the extra time to assemble and combine all of them, plus the weekly 3 hour long work/check-in sessions. Also, to do this project, we learned how to use a sewing machine!!!! We saw it on our floor in Next House, and were like “whaattt, who’s is that?” and then our friend who was walking near us was like “ that’s Amelia’s. She lives right in front of you guys” and then we asked her to use it. And then she let us use it. And now, we can use a sewing machine! (It’s actually harder than we thought, but now we want to use it again, and get better.) This is our almost finished project (we just need to mount it on a board):

Random Other Stuff That Happened This Month:

--We had to drop 6.s080 (a brief intro to python) because of the workload from the above listed stuff.

--We also took Intermediate Ice Skating!  This was super fun! We now can more decently use our edges! We still need to work on our crossovers and turning from forwards to backwards. We can’t wait to take Figure Skating next! (Bless the MIT PE requirement. We were skeptical about it at first, but we are so happy with the variety! They offer 3 levels of ice skating - Beginning, Intermediate, and Figure!) On that theme, there is also a figure skating club, which we feel like we really want to join! Yuri on Ice has seriously ruined us.

 --We also participated (only for the last hour though) in the telethon to congratulate early action admitted students to the class of 2021. It was so fun! We will definitely do the one for regular action!

--We moved from Baker House to Next House! We didn’t except the waitlist to work, but it did! We are really happy with the Next House community! Our friend made us a Peridiot Door Sticker AHHHHH!

 --We saw La La land! Ugghhh this movie. Amazing but Uggghh the ending. You’ll understand if you saw it.

--We baked 2 things in Next House with friends!

--We finished watching all three Very Potter Musicals and are now obsessed with Lauren Lopez.

 Yep, that was our IAP. Bye Bye for now!

[allandanny]

KNITTED SWEATERS (purple made by allan, yellow/blue made by danny)

tutorial click here

[allandanny]

How We Made Sweaters in 4 (not-so-easy-time-consuming) Steps!

back:

1. cast on a multiple of 3 stiches for the length of a sweater that fits you. that is how we determined the number of stiches to use (39 stiches).

2. knit 3, purl 3 stiches (rib stich) for a border

3. knit 1, purl 1 stich (stockinette stich) until armpit length

4. decrease by 1 stich on both sides

5. continue stockinette stich until start of shoulder

6. decrease stiches on both sides until top of shoulder

7. cast off.

front:

1-5 from above

6. for the first decreasing row at the start of the shoulder, cast off stiches the length of your neck.

7. Decrease stiches on both sides of the sections to the left and right of what will be your neck whole for every row until you get the body of you piece as large as the body of sweater that fits you. you will need to do to finish one before starting the other, otherwise you will end up with essentially a guitar.

8. From this step 3 things could happen.

- The ideal situation is that when you make complete triangles on both sides, it gets to the right length and the neck whole is the perfect size.

-The not so ideal situation is that the neck whole is too big, in which case creatively sew together your back and front pieces in a way to make the neck hole smaller (that’s what we did)

-If you reached the desired length before they become triangles, just cast off your trapezoidal shoulder pieces and it will still fit together with your back piece. If the neck whole is big in this case as well, do the same as for situation 2.

2 sleeves:

1.cast on a multiple of 2 stiches for twice the length of the wrist of a sleeve of a sweater that fits you (20 stiches in our case)

2. knit 2, purl 2 stiches (rib stich) for a border

3. knit 1, purl 1 stich (stockinette stich), making sure to increase 4-5 times throughout until you get the length of your arm.

4. increase for two rows in a row (repetition unintended).

5. cast off and repeat for the second sleeve.

Combining:

sew together all the seams of the same color on this diagram

 Final Product Click Here!

[allandanny]

For our friends christmas present, we made a charms bracelet (using polymer clay) featuring her initials and all her favorite things (photography, polaroid pictures, and music)!

[allandanny]

For our final project for Gender and Media Studies, we made fan art pieces of shows with excellent LGBTQ+ representation! These are our three favorite (probably cause Steven Universe is our favorite current cartoon)!

[allandanny]

How to make a rainbow cake with a sprinkle of (failed) surprise!

1. Divide cake batter into six bowls and mix with the six colors of the rainbow.

2. Realize you only have 2 baking trays, so divide them into 2 sections each by placing a tinfoil barrier. Now bake 4/6 of the colors and then the other 2/6 colors in the next batch.  You have successfully cut out 1 of the 3 batches so your baking time is now 2/3 of what it would have been!

3. Layer with icing between each color!

4. decide that covering the entire cake with white icing would take to long so melt a little icing in the microwave and then drizzle it all over the top! (pretend that it didn't look weird after the microwave)

5. As if it wasn't rainbow enough, use sprinkles to make another rainbow on top!

6. Realizes the person you are making this birthday cake for is not in her room.

7. Awkwardly call her and hang up because you get nervous for giving away the surprise.

8. Reply to her text ("???") revealing that you baked her a cake.

9. Wait until she comes back one hour later. lol

10. Taste the rainbow. (literally)