Hi everyone :)

This week has been a week very focused on school. I have three major projects all due on December 2nd and I am doing my best to have them completed before leaving for Ireland next week. The projects are actually pretty interesting, but they are all a lot of work.

In Fashion Marketing, our class is putting on an event for the last week of classes. The event is titled "Lighten your Luggage, Donate your Rubbage", cleverly named by me! We are basically encouraging all of the students at our school to bring in the things that they do not plan on taking back to the U.S. with them but are still in decent condition. We are collecting everything from clothes, to appliances, nonperishable food items, linens and text books. Our job is to create a drop off spot for these belongings and then find a charity or organization to donate them to. Some of the items (like blow dryers, textbooks, adapters) we will put in a separate area to have for the students that will be coming to study here next year. The idea itself is a great idea, but it is a lot of work. We have to research the organizations, get together supplies and promote it all within about two weeks. I am part of the PR committee so my part will involve making flyers, sending out emails and making announcements in classrooms. The event will be concluded the day before we fly home!

In Product Development, we have had an ongoing group project throughout the entire semester. On December 2nd is when we will do our final presentation that involves the combination of all of our past products into one very large product. The project itself is pretty straight forward. We design a product, produce it and promote it. The item our group made is a T-shirt that is for Kent State University Florence. It is a souvenir item. We have had to create inspiration boards, research our target market, find fabric swatches, create prototypes, choose a fit model, hold fit meetings, create costing sheets, outline our production sequence and even go so far as to decide what low wage country we will be producing it in (hypothetically of course). The final presentation is the kind of presentation that we would present to store buyers who could potentially by large quantities of our product to carry in their stores. As you can tell, this is a very large undertaking as well but after December 2nd we will finally be finished!

The last final project that we are currently working on is for Italian Fashion and Culture. The project is a company comparison of Louis Vuitton and Gucci. We have researched mission statements, financial figures (which are all very UGLY!), advertising campaigns, store layouts/designs, products, services, and PR events. Basically anything we could possibly find about the company was put together in this project. We will be putting together a ten page paper as well as a power point which we will have to present in front of the class for twenty minutes. The section that I specifically worked on was the Promotional Plan. I examined ad campaigns, store events, sponsorships, fashion shows, and product packaging. Fortunately, I already have my part of the project completed for this class so I'm able to focus on my other classes for the last few weeks.

So there you go! For those of you who claim I haven't been doing much school work while i've been here... think again! Hahaha. These are just the large projects due. I have about handful of other short papers and presentations that I am preparing for as well.

This weekend Jill and I have plans to visit Pisa (to take pictures with the leaning tower, of course!), the outlets again, to see the Duomo and the Statue of David. How horrible is it that I have lived in the same city as the statue of David for 3 Months and still haven't seen him!

That is all for now, I hope everyone enjoys watching OSU kick Michigan's butt this weekend! I am thoroughly sad that I will not be down in Columbus with my girlfriends to watch it this year! And I also hope that none of them choose to jump in Mirror Lake tonight, I hear its only 20 degrees there!!! Have a great weekend, I will be on here once more before we depart for Ireland on Wednesday! Love you and miss you all.

Ciao for Now,

Carrie