When you don’t eat meat and one of your good friends is a taxidermist, the jokes practically write themselves.

But, jokes aside, my friend Mickey is a taxidermist by trade. I’ve been friends with this girl since high school, when we both obsessed over things like UnderOath, pyramid-studded belts and Vans sneakers together.

I’ve always felt kind of bad, because I really wanted to support her career, but also I didn’t really want to gut and stuff a dead rat. You know, normal friendship dilemmas.

So, I got super stoked when I found out that she was offering a not-quite-as-gruesome class at the recent Pilsen Renegade Craft Fair pop-up: Butterfly pinning!

Important side note: No butterflies were killed during the making of this project. That would be sad. This little guy died naturally at a butterfly farm.

This craft takes two sessions to make, because the butterfly needs to be moist when you spread it, and then dry when you mount it. I did the first part of the project at Renegade, and then Mickey came over and helped me finish it up a few weeks later.

I’m totally in love with how this framed specimen turned out!

Oh, and the best part? She also sells these kits in her Etsy store (affiliate link), so you can actually buy your supplies and do this at home! No worries — the directions are included.

An interesting fact about my little Chicago apartment: it’s only my second ever apartment to offer a front door closed off to the general public. You need two keys to get to it: a building key, and a unit key.

All but one of my college apartments and houses had outdoor-accessible doors. This meant that anything you left by the front door — doormats, shoes, shovels, half-finished bottles of pomegranate Burnett’s, seasonal decor, mail — would end up stolen.

So, one of the things I love about #aptwithani is the hallway-facing front door, because it means I can decorate it for each season with a beautiful wreath, without having to worry quite so much about it disappearing.

Yesterday marked my two-year anniversary in Chicago. Where has the time gone? It doesn’t feel like it’s been two years since I packed my boxes into a U-Haul and moved into my little apartment.

Oh, my little apartment.

There are so many things I love about the city, but real estate is not one of them.

You know what I’m talking about — the impossibly tiny closet-sized units that come with all the perks of big city living.

Seriously. Sitcoms are filled with totally unrealistic expectations of big-city apartment living.

I’m looking at you, Carrie Bradshaw.