To all choosing a college: Good luck!! 

Hey guys I am super busy right now. Like "How am I supposed to balance school and life and writing posts?!!?!?" busy. You know how it is at AP exam time. 

So... I am going to try to kill a few birds with one stone and do everything at once: Today I am going to tell you about what I got out of the Mid-Atlantic IB college fair back in mid-April as I sort through papers and try to figure out things for college. 

It works like this: My parents want me to go to a local school and be a teacher but I am super not interested. If I leave the home and do my own thing, then I get to pay for it and my parents will be super disappointed. So because its just easier to go with the flow, I really havent spent much time thinking about what I want to do with my life and where I would want to go. 

However, after a college fair, I have a few things figured out that would probbly not work out were I to choose a school.

Its a super long list, in no particular order, and pretty much narrows everything out at one point or another but you gotta start thinking about college somewhere right?

1. It cant be cold. I am all for snow days but not all for -10 degree weather and 3 feet of snow for several months of the year. 
2. It cant be close. I am in PA and anything Mid-Atlanticcy better be pretty special for me to be interested. I want to meet new people and see new things and how can I do that if I dont ever leave the nest? So west? Yes please. South? I guess it could work. 1/2 an hour away from my hometown? I dont think so. 
3. If everyone is white and or Christian I am going to leave. That would be awful. I literally was talking to one of the places and they were like "yeah, we are Quaker and 80+ percent of our people are white" so I left. Maybe that is someone elses perfect school, but it wouldnt be mine. 
4. It cant be in the city. Honestly, I think I need a school like in the middle of no where because I cant do noise. At all. I dont want to hear the highway or trains or traffic or construction.  I want a diverse group but I am absolutely not willing to spend half my day in traffic to do so. I want space and nature and real life ....and if I never get to Broadway, it will be okay. 
5. It has to have study abroad options. Has to. 
6. Well I am prejudiced against the ones that constantly spam my email or postal mailbox. Some days I get like 7 things in the mail. And its the same dozen colleges that the College Board has given my name and email to. Sorry guys (read:colleges) but it gets a little old. At the fair there were like three or four that I recognized (out of like 122, lol) and I didnt talk to them at all because they already pester me at all hours of the day. :/ 
7. I cant be in all lecture classes. I realize that it might be a bit overboard to have a 10:1 student to staff ratio, so I dont want that, but I also would like to get to know my professors and the other students. 
8. It cant be all Americans. I think it would be super cool to have a room mate from another country and get to know people who know other languages. 
9. However if I am the foreign roommate, I must understand the language :)  I'm pretty sure some of those no-tuition European countries have really great colleges but I'm not sure I would do that great in Sweden or Slovenia if classes werent in English. 
10. It would be great if they gave credit for AP and IB. Also I might take some CLEP tests so I would love if they would give credit for those. 
11. I used to be an English person, and then a history person, but lately I dont really know. I want to religion, but I dont know what I would do with that. I also really want to do Spanish, but just because I like talking the language. I would like to learn how to fly, but more as a medical missionary thing where you fly vaccinations to a remote place without a paved runway. I want to do photography, but not of people or for film... I just like chasing storms and watching pretty sunsets. I feel like Spanish and religion are at the top of the list but that they arent a main course, theyre your dessert, belonging as minor areas of study.... but I'm not exactly sure what I want at all. :/

Again, my parents are pushing for me to be a teacher. 

Hope everyone's week is going alright. 

Things here are crazy intense and I really enjoyed this video so I thought I would share. 

So it all started when I found a cool Patchwork skirt but it was sold for $140. Guess who doesnt have $140 for a skirt? Me. 

... But after a bit of research I found this website which walks you through what to do... Yay!!

Here are some key points I took from the article:

• Tiered circle skirts like this one work by each successive layer being one and a half times longer than the last.
• All you need to figure out is the size of and how many patches go into your first layer (as a chain), and then multiply that number by 1.5 for each layer you add.

So the long version or what to do goes like this: 

1. Measurement A: The waist of your skirt. If you would like to make a sundress with a tank top, use the bottom of the tank for this measurement A. My sample number is 38 inches. 
2. Determine the size of the squares. You will lose at least 1/2 an inch per side of each square, so add that in.
3. Measurement B (length per square) is found using B = (Total Finished Length plus both top and bottom "hems") + .5*(number of tiers) / (5 OR 6 tiers depending on how many you want). This value has nothing to do with the A value.  

 
For me this looked something like [40 +(.5)(5)] / 5 and my answer was B= 8.5ish. Doesnt have to be anything fancy, but you have to be consistent with whatever you choose. Where the ish comes in: The top row would have to be more like 9.5 for elastic casing and the bottom a little longer (maybe just 9) for the hem. 

       4. Measurement C: How wide are squares? 
        Note: maybe now we should call them rectangles. 

I knew that I wanted a length of 7ish, but 40 is not a factor of 7ish (lol). So I decided to do 6 of 6.75 inches left-to-right. Because seam allowances ended up making me need more than I thought. 

Recap: At this point I know to cut all my "squares" 7 inches tall and 6.75 inches wide EXCEPT for the top 6 and whatever many the bottom ones would be..... 

Layer 1! On the above tutorial, the D measurement was her first tier which was 1.5 as big a circumference as the tank top. Because I'm having elastic in Layer 1, its just going to be as already stated. But the posts are going to contrast from here on out. 

We can call D the number of squares in our first tier, for me being 6. 

• Layer 2 The next tier is going to have 1.5 the squares of D, or 9 squares. 
• Layer 3 The next tier is going to have 1.5 the squares of that, or 14 squares. (13.5 rounds up)
• Layer 4 The next tier is going to have 1.5 the squares of that, or 21 squares (Uh, oh)
• Layer 5 The next tier is going to have 1.5 the squares of that, or 32 squares. (31.5 rounds up)

**At this point, I found that I really didnt want to do 6 tiers. With the first having 6, my sixth row had 48 squares and that just way too much fabric... 6.75*48 is like 27 feet of fabric, no thank you. 

Total squares: 82 
Total Fabric: A lot. 

     5. Okay now you have to learn how to gather and sew it all together. 

I guess its time to get that fabric now :)