Sewing Adventures Part 1

So for my birthday, Mom and Dad gave me a pattern, material, and notions to make dresses and skirts!  It was one of the very best birthday presents EVER!!!  I've never sewed a dress before, I've done a lot of skirts, and almost finished a shirt, but I've always wanted to try a dress. 
I made the dress with the black fabric first, and it went really well.  It was so exciting to see it come together!  Mom helped with the zipper and other confusing and hard parts, either giving advice or doing it for me, teaching at the same time.  YAY FOR MOMS!!!!
Here's me in it:

We put gathered sparkly fabric on the hem, and it's a spaghetti strap because I hate sewing sleeves (Which I've just figured out) and wanted to be able to choose what color to put under it.  Here it is without my spiffy shrug thing:

It looks good with a lot of colors layered under it, and I happen to be a color-holic, so I'm glad to choose what shirt goes under it.  :D  haha  Many thanks to Jiggers for taking these pictures...
I'm still working on Project #2.  It's a dress that's green with a flower print on it, and will match with black, brown, or white shoes, so I get to have fun with colors with that one that too.  That dress was going to have sleeves because it was going to be cuter that way, but I just finished the top the other day, and it looked gross, both on me, and off me.  So it's back to the drawing board with Project #2.  Mom and I are going to be looking over it tomorrow, and I think something will inspire us, hopefully...  it was at least a good learning experience to be able to sew those STUPID sleeves though, so I'm still glad I did it... I really don't like sleeve sewing.
The third project doesn't know if it's a skirt or a dress.  It'll figure itself out when Project 2 is done.
Thankfully as a Glenn Beck Insider, I can listen to Glenn whilst sewing, and also I can review General Conference, or talk to Mom if she's in there with me, so it's never boring!  The biggest annoyance is not being able to just sew all the time!  haha just kidding
And by the way, if you're looking for the perfect cereal, go buy some Chocolate Marshmallow Mateys from WinCo.

Never again... and the Garden

I'm never naming another blog Happy [Insert Month here] [insert date here] again.  Because my crazy friends on Google Buzz will never stop posting on it.  :P  :D  haha
That being said, I should blog about something...  because I haven't for a while.
OH!!!!!!!!
I started another GARDEN!  Last year's garden was awesome!  It was crazy though, because we technically started late.  We got everything ready to go I think by Memorial day.  And I think we planted indoors in the middle of April, but I don't quite remember.  I should check my journal.  Anyways, I planted tomatoes and some other plants the Monday before St Patty's day, and they're coming up looking healthy and awesome!  The peppers take so long!  I hope they'll all come up.  So far, the yellow peppers seem to have sprouted.  And as per normal gardening, whenever Dad and I find a plant that grows in purple, we plant it.  This year's garden will sport:
Purple Peppers
Purple Cabbage
Purple Basil (my personal favorite, I love basil!)
Something else that's purple, romaine lettuce, I believe
BEETS!  Lots of beets!  I LOVE BEETS!!!  They're especially good when Mom uses her sweet skillz to pickle 'em!  NOM!
We almost got purple carrots, but that seemed a bit overboard... and they were way more expensive than normal carrots.
I'll be posting pictures of 'em eventually, I love to photograph the awesome garden.  Dad and I also found some black hollyhocks, so that's going to be really fun to see how those turn out, they might be as cool as the candy cane striped Zinnias, but I'm not sure, those will be pretty awesome!
And I've never grown cherry tomatoes before, but we have some of those!
And the Yellow Peppers are going to be fun, of course!  I love having so many different colors in the garden.
Roma tomatoes too, so hopefully we'll have some fun with Salsa this year.  AND I got some strawberry seeds to sprout!  * gasp! *  I didn't know if those were going to come up, but they're so cute and tiny, and a few have sprouted!
And right now, the best spot in our house to grow these plants indoors is in my parent's bathtub... poor people... they're very patient with the whole thing, but I'll have some scrubbing to do when everything has been planted outside...  :D

Alice in Wonderland

This movie may take its place as one of my all-time favorites.
That being said, it was weird. Just like the book! In the old Disney animated film, I was sure something was out to get me. There were evil, stuck-up flowers that were your friend one minute, your bitter enemies the next. There was that horrid carpenter and the Walrus. Alice had a shrill voice, and she kept screeching. The Red Queen... no words to describe how disturbed I was about her. Combine Captain Hook and Cruella De Vill and you had her. So imagine my surprise when I opened up the book one day, and discovered the real Wonderland, full of zany and lovable characters who were more than a little crazy, situations that didn't end up stressing out the reader, and Alice as a curious fun girl with quirks. It was one of the happiest moments of my life to read the books. The books are some of my favorites.
When I found out they were going to make a movie, I had my doubts. When I found out it was Tim Burton, I felt better. That's a little backwards, but if anyone could capture Wonderland, it was him.
And I wasn't disappointed! From beginning to end, the whole movie was so imaginative, brilliant, and enjoyable. I don't think I'd let small children watch it, he made this movie very deep, with quirky characters and disturbing monsters. It all turns out for the best at the end, just how it should. Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter was perfect. He's an amazing actor, and Alice was fantastic! She was everything she should've been, and quite recovered her muchness. The only complaint was that I wanted it to be longer, I just loved it. The Cheshire Cat, which has always been a favorite of mine in the book, was even better in the movie. Stephen Fry voiced him with that perfect amount of charm and craziness required by the Cheshire Cat. The March Hare was another favorite of mine, as I also go mad in March... ;) The computer animated characters looked real.
And as for the Red Queen, she was fantastic. I loved how she was like a spoiled child. The White Queen was a presence I sorely missed in the animated version, and Tim Burton re-thought her perfectly to fit into Wonderland (or Underland). Anne Hathaway was a perfect fit to play her, gracious and slightly insane.
THE JABBERWOCKY!!!! Find one of the original illustrations from Through the Looking Glass with the Jabberwocky, and then imagine it stepped right off the page. I thought the Jabberwocky made the Balrog look like a lap dog, but that's just my opinion. Computer animation has drastically improved.
And as always, Danny Elfman created a wonderful soundtrack that enhanced the movie.
I loved the quotes from the movie. One of my favorites is when Alice's Dad is talking to her at the beginning of the movie:
Alice. "Do you think I've gone round the bend?"
Dad. "I'm afraid so. You're bonkers! But do you know what? All the best people in the world are."

Happy March 1st!

Well, I thought I might blog about something non-web related. Please don't have a heart attack!
As a result, I have no idea what to say... ;) Bye!

WOOT!!!!

I FIXED IT!!!!!!! YAAAAAAAAY!!!!
So I found this thing yesterday online (one of the biggest parts of programming is learning how to use google... ;) ) and it's an htc file which uses Javascript that makes IE compatible with the :hover command. So yesterday I was playing with it, and it wasn't working, and that made me mad. Today I went back to it to play with it some more, and after viewing the source on a site I knew worked, I copied their code and pasted it into my htc file. Then I referenced it in my external style sheet, and refreshed my website.
AND IT WORKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
XDD
So I'm a little excited... :D my gallery is here if you want to see it! Now whether in IE or Firefox, it should work!
Thanks to http://www.xs4all.nl/~peterned/csshover.html for the code!

Computer Adventures part 1

So I have an AWESOME web design class right now, it's definitely one of my favorites! Using http://w3schools.com/, we're going through tutorials with CSS and HTML. HTML is fun to refresh, my coding skills are pretty outdated. I mean, it's the same HTML, but I've never played with the div tags and the span tags. I've missed out a lot apparently, 'cuz they're super fun. If you want to see the website I'm building (and keep in mind, this is my experimental playground, so nothing is really serious... ;) ) the URL is http://shcheidi.webng.com/

But I'm having some trouble with the Internet Explorer non-support of the :hover tag in CSS. And it's starting to bug me. I have an awesome gallery of flowers which are all images, and when I hover over them in Firefox, they go to full opacity, but in IE, they don't.
Now, I could just copy/paste the following code into my HTML:

<img src="flowers/flower1.jpg" style="opacity: 0.4;"
onmouseover="this.style.opacity=1;
this.filters.alpha.opacity=100" 
onmouseout="this.style.opacity=0.4;
this.filters.alpha.opacity=40" 
/>

and it works in both browsers flawlessly. The problem is, what if I have 40 images in my gallery? That would take tons of time to copy/paste it for every single one... and that would be really impractical if I suddenly decided to decrease or increase opacity. I'd have to edit every one of them.
So yesterday I asked my brother, who is a genius and knows CSS better than I do, and he found the following code for me to put into my external style sheet:
img#flower {
opacity:0.4;
filter:alpha(opacity=40);
border: none;
}

img#flower:hover {
opacity:1.0;
filter:alpha(opacity=100);
border:none;
}
and it works perfectly in Firefox. And I only have to edit the style sheet for it to work in my web page. The reference I have in my HTML is:
<img id="flower" src="http://www.blogger.com/flowers/flower2.jpg" />
with the id="flower" I reference my CSS external style sheet. It's pretty awesome, I'm still thrilled with that ability to do that... :D
BUT it doesn't work in IE. So I'm going to keep researching and find out what I can do about that. Believe me, if I find a break though, you'll be the first to know.
And hopefully you guys won't stop following me after this post... it's a bit weird to read... haha

Sleepy....

Thus is the life of a college student. It's okay though, I suppose...

But seriously, it's tough to try to stay awake during classes. Right now we're talking about object oriented programming, describing the clock to the computer. It's pretty entertaining, there are a whole lot of things I've never even thought about. Think of describing a piece of toast to a fish. A slightly more intelligent fish, but still, the fish hasn't seen, tasted, or smelt toast, and you need to start at the very beginning to even get the fish thinking about it.

You: "Hey Fish, how's it going?"

Fish: "Pretty good, just the same as usual."

You: "Well, that's great! Have you ever had a piece of toast?"

Fish: "..."

You: "Uh... how about bread?"

Fish: "..."

You: "I see. Well, I just thought of several things I have to do, so I'll talk to ya later Fish!"

Fish: "You're really weird."

You: * is GONE *

So that's just a little sample, but we actually have to describe it. So I'll be signing off now and listening, so I know how to do it...