Sunday 11 September 2016

Leeds Festival ǀ 2016

If I reflect up on my whole summer, and take into account my trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Croatia, I still would not be answering truthfully if I were to say that any of these experiences could be compared to going to Leeds festival. This was honestly some of the best fun I have ever had. The decision attend this resulted in me missing sometime in Croatia, and consequentially missing my family having to travel all the way back to England with a dog and a broken down car. Although this would most definitely have been an adventure, I was more than happy to be getting on my two flights back to England (stopping in Dusseldorf on the way) with my friend Emma.

The journey to Leeds consisted of a train, some walking through central Manchester in wellies and then a coach. We had to take turns carrying the tent which had the main purpose of concealing at least a crate's worth of beer. Eventually we arrived at the campsite. At this stage, on the very first night, I knew only one person however by the time the festival was over I was friends with closer to forty. It was such a great experience even though I missed some of the headline acts, and I would love to repeat it. I also think that making so many friends in such a short space of time also improved my confidence little bit too.

Leeds was maybe a hundred times wilder than I expected it to be, it has to have been the craziest week of my life to date. My other summer travels were very different to these five short days but I don't think I would change a single thing about how I chose to spend my summer. I will write about Poland and Vietnam etc. soon, I just chose to write this slightly easier one first.






Friday 1 July 2016

Leaving High School

I am not even sure where to begin with this post, I don't think I have ever written about a more significant change or life event so far on my blog than this. My posts seem to be about more light hearted and less meaningful occurrences and they veer away from any emotional moments that I could mention. Honestly, I have enjoyed year eleven more than I can even say. I have become close to so many more people and it makes me so sad to think that I will no longer be able to spend all of my weekdays with the people that have managed to make me so frequently cry with laughter. I regret nothing that has happened in the last ten months (except, perhaps, not revising a little more) and I don't think there has ever been a period of time in my life where I have laughed more.

Every morning of the past year has started similarly, with being late usually, and having to speed walk to school. My friend Bridie would come over and make my lunch and very soon her, her younger sister Niamh and my sisters became almost a team, that were dedicated to getting me out of the door before five to nine, which was the target time for us. Living close to school was convenient because people could come over for lunch and we would have somewhere to go for thirty minutes or so, people could also come over when I had days off and they would have lunch with me. This was never a bad thing and I wasn't disappointed on the days where I expected only two or three friends to come over and closer to ten people arrived. I will miss so many people so much, everyone in my class and anyone that I shared inside jokes with. There aren't really enough photos here to constitute a decent blogpost, to demonstrate how much I will miss people and to show how close our year was as a whole. I'm really looking forward to going to prom and seeing them all again.




 







Wednesday 29 June 2016

My GCSE Textiles Coursework

I know that judging by the title of this post, it seems like quite possibly the lamest thing that I could have ever chosen to make my first blog post in a long while about. Considering how I have spent time in Poland fairly recently also, it does seem like quite an uninteresting and potentially boring "Welcome Back" post now that my exams have finally finished. Anyway, it is what it is: my textiles coursework, and incidentally one of the reasons I have not spent nearly enough time on here this year (I'll write about Poland soon for those that would perhaps find that more engaging).

Since Snowboarding in Easter until about a month afterwards, this was what I spent so much of my free time on. As one of the briefs for the coursework was "child's play", I decided to make a Cinderella fancy dress costume for children aged two to five. Preferably this all should have been completed over the course of a year while I was in year ten however, it erm, wasn't somehow and to be quite honest I am not entirely certain that passing textiles (with four weeks to cram coursework and only a day of revision for the theory exam) is likely. It reached the stage where my teacher was telling me she was having nightmares about sending my coursework off with a score of 6/100. At the time of parents evening it was scoring eight out of a hundred, when I sent it off a few weeks later it had reached 88/100. I am proud of what I made though regardless, and I will post pictures of the folder I did for it whenever I get it back. Until then, I have only the photos of the completed dress and pictures of the process behind it. It is a reversible costume so that on one side there is the ball gown and the Cinderella rags are on the other side.

At least I'm blogging about a more visual and interesting subject and not uploading all of my english essays or anything, although I did grow to kind of hate textiles when working my way through a tedious two folders of work. When I get my art back, I will upload photos of that also because that was the other main creative subject I chose to take and also something I have been spending time on often over the past few months.I don't think people realise how much work is actually involved for more creative subjects, it does take up a considerable amount of time that you could be using in order to revise for your more academic subjects. I was the only one in my school to take art, textiles and then nine science exams in one year so, I just have to hope that the intense coursework and last-minute approach to this hasn't affected the rest of my results. My word of advice to anyone taking a more creative subject would be to stay on top of the coursework. This could have been very easy if I'd done that.




 

 







The photos below are the same finished dress modelled on a two year old and on a six year old. 








In the end, I got an A* for this and won the textiles award of the year.