It is finally the weekend. I have successfully made it through the first week of my second semester of my third year as an undergrad at Cornell. My week was a little rough; I star1ted the semester off not having any idea what classes to take (although I was aiming to take classes that would teach me valuable life skills), and just when I thought my schedule was good, I realized that my plant physiology class (lecture + lab, a total of 5 credits) was not at all what I had hoped for, and so I was faced with the difficult task of finding new classes that fit around my current ones and my work schedule. It was very difficult and frustrating, but I am very grateful to Karli because she encouraged me to drop the plant physiology class in favor of taking classes that I would actually enjoy (the textbook for the class was a draft written by the professor, and I was going crazy trying to read it because there were so many grammatical errors and it was just written poorly in general).
This semester, I am taking Sculpture IV with Michael Ashkin (I had him last semester for sculpture and really loved the class), Early Agriculture (how we evolved from nomadic peoples to an agriculturally-based society), Seminar in Agricultural Science (current issues in agriculture), Hands-On Horticulture (basic horticultural techniques), The Nature of Plants (plant interactions), Wines & Vines Laboratory (how to make your own wine, graft your own grape vines, etc.), and Food, Farming, & Personal Beliefs (tying the three together and their relationship to sustainable agriculture). Oh yeah, and a few credits of independent research with the Communication Department under Jeff Hancock (we still have a study to run that Steph and I designed over the summer).
I found out on Thursday that muslin pictures of my designs for CDL (Cornell Design League, the fashion design club I am in ) are due this coming week, and although I tried to work on them over break, I just didn’t get much done because I was doing so many other awesome things. So, this weekend, I plan on just working on homework and my designs. Last night, I went to the two, just two, fabric stores in Ithaca that carry apparel fabrics, and couldn’t find what I was looking for in either store. I need to find some very light, semi-transparent cotton, I am not sure of the exact name for it, but looking online, it might be called ‘cotton lawn’. I get to design two outfits this year because I was a first-year designer last year, and every successive year, you get more designs and models. I want my designs to be very flowy and moveable. I want the wearer to want to dance and move when she wears the outfit, and I want the designs’ movements to mirror those of the wearer and communicate her body’s expressions to others.
That being said, I also have a potluck/party to go to tonight, and thought it would be really awesome to try to experiment with some gluten-free chocolate cupcakes to bring. I attempted to whip up some cupcakes last night by modifying the recipe on About.com for gluten-free german chocolate cake (http://vegetarian.about.com/od/glutenfreedesserts/r/germanchocolate.htm, I made this recipe once before and it turned out well). The changes I made caused the batter to behave very bizarrely; the cupcakes didn’t really rise, and instead sunk in the centers. However, they were delicious and had a semi-crunchy top kind of like a muffin. Since they were good, I won’t condemn the entire recipe, but I definitely will make sure I don’t make the same mistakes next time! I am thinking about tearing apart the cupcakes, mixing them with frosting, rolling them into balls and coating them in chocolate to make chocolate truffles..... I'll let you know how that goes!
...more recipes to come soon, I have just been busy with school!
