I started taking photos way back in the dark ages (high school). My Nikon D750 (Digital) and Nikkormat EL (Film) are my go to cameras, but I have a collection of other antique cameras and will happily gush over their technical specs at the slightest provocation. While I was an undergrad, I was an editor for the photo section of the Chicago Maroon (the UChicago college paper) where I got to take photos at various events around campus and Chicago. In my time on the paper some of the cool people/things that I have gotten to take photos of are Hillary and Bill Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Bernie Sanders (twice), Panic! At The Disco, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and more. My photos have been in the UChicago Magazine and I got an award from ICPA for my photos of the UChicago Medical Center Nurses Strike. You can check out all of the photos I took for the Chicago Maroon here. I also take photos for campus clubs and for my own enjoyment.
Embroidery has become a favorite pastime. It turns out that repeatedly stabbing a piece of fabric is quite therapeutic. I'm still getting a handle on my embroidery style but, in the meantime, I have been having a blast embroidering random logos.
Photos of my embroidery
Recently I've been making a lot of small quilts as gifts for my friends. most of my quilts end up being appliquéd with a sort of hawaiian quilting pattern.
I am particularly proud of the SUPERgroup quilt (the main research group I worked in during undergrad) I made during my gap year. I didn't have a sewing machine so it was entirely done by hand, had a ton of colors, tricky cutouts for the large letters, super dense embroidery for the smaller letters, was backed in passwords fabric, and had somewhere between 8 to 11 stitches per inch when I was doing hand quilting. It took about 145 hours and it was totally worth it for how it turned out.
Photos of my quilts
The summer before grad school I got a sewing machine and I've been slowly learning how to make clothing.
Photos of my sewing projects
I mainly create amigurumi versions of animals and video game characters. I love creating my own patterns and thinking about how my choices of stitches change the resulting shape of the object I am creating. The most ambitious crochet project I ever took on was a seven-foot-long coral reef for the admin building of my high school that showed the effect of coral bleaching. It has been used as a part of the "reef teach" project as a way to educate elementary school students about risks to coral reefs.
I'm pretty good at knitting. I mainly focus on knitting hats that involve a lot of cabling, but I've also made scarves and shawls. For the Engineering Interactive Electronics onto Printed Circuit Boards class I took spring quarter I designed a PCB to count and detect the types stitches that a person does. I'm trying to improve the design of the circuit for fun in my very limited free time!
I lived in St. Kitts for a while and have visited the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Bermuda, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Israel, Italy, the Vatican, Hong Kong, Macau, Belgium, and Luxemburg. Hopefully I will get to do a bit more traveling post-pandemic, but I guess we'll see.