Small project

A friend at work has been exceptionally supportive with a challenging situation lately, and she is also obsessed with Harry Potter. Hence, this small weekend project for her:

Nothing like releasing work anxiety in embroidery form!

Compost Cross Stitch

Ben and I started composting a few months ago - we don't have a yard, but we signed up for a service that picks up a compost bucket from our building once a week. They have a list of things that can and can't go in the bucket, which we printed out and taped to the wall above it:

But that was ugly, and I was bored, so I cross stitched the list instead.

This is actually the first of my creations to hang in our house - I usually have a rule that I can only make things to give to other people, so as to avoid filling the whole house with needlepoint. Thankfully, we have 6 weddings on the calendar in the upcoming year, and 2 more engaged sets of friends who haven't picked a date yet, so that should keep me busy enough to avoid the temptation of making more for myself for a while!

Escalation

We have an ongoing pen pal exchange with our friends up in Boston (if you haven't already, read part one, part two, and part three). After a several month hiatus, we got a device in the mail from them. When we plugged it into a battery, this happened:
When decoded, the lights spelled out a URL in morse code (we were about to visit them and go to a Final Fantasy concert together, hence that particular video link).

A while ago I saw a tutorial on making woven bead bracelets, so I decided to give it a go with our response. I wove a braille link into a bracelet, and I think it turned out pretty well:

The whole bracelet

Close up of the pattern

We were nervous about the security of sending such sensitive information in the mail, though, so we decided to send it to them in a locked box. But since we can't trust the mailman, we didn't want to mail them the key. So we mailed it to them like this:

Thankfully, they knew just what to do, and a week later we received it back like this:

(we ended up switching our gold lock to the other side before we mailed it to them)

We then removed our lock and sent it back to them, so they could remove their lock and open it upon receipt:

Thank you, Diffie and Hellman!

Robots!

This weekend was our fourth year volunteering at the Southeastern PA First Lego League championships. As always, it was a ton of fun to spend a day hanging out with excited middle school nerds!

All dressed up to make the kids feel more relaxed.

At this point we've done FLL so many times that I don't really have anything new or insightful to say, but if we do it next year too then we'll get a five-year pin!