Girly Time, Part 1

I promised stories and photos from my visit with Bev and Nancy a few days ago, so here we go. We had a fabulous time and, as expected, we ate too much and laughed a lot. (No booze this time though. We had plenty of fun sober.) Wednesday was about shopping and a movie. Yeah, baby! For us, shopping meant mostly book stores and fabric stores, and yes, I bought some of each. You'll no doubt be seeing some of those fabrics show up in things in the coming months (yes, I will be sewing! sheesh!) and hearing about some of the books as I read them. The only photo I took on the shopping part of our day was this: The wall of party supplies in Hobby Lobby caught my eye and I just LOVED the orange and yellow section, especially the plates and those gorgeous napkins! After we were all shopped out, we had an early supper and then went to see Memoirs of a Geisha. I loved it. I wasn't sure I would, as it's gotten some pretty crappy reviews from a lot of sources, but I thought it was wonderful. I hadn't read the book before we went, but read it immediately after (over the past couple of nights) and I loved the book too. I nearly always like books better than the movies made from them and this was no exception, but I thought the movie captured the spirit of the book admirably and the details that were left out or changed slightly didn't bother me at all in this case. And the visuals were simply stunning. Really. There were images in that film that are haunting me days later. Even if I hadn't liked the story as much as I did, I would want to see the movie again just for that amazing imagery. There's one scene in particular, that I don't want to describe because it would be something of a spoiler to those who haven't see it yet, that left me almost breathless because I thought it was just so damn beautiful and unexpected. I'm going to want this one on DVD. This photo (my effort towards posting an arsty-ish thing for the day) might give a tiny hint to those who have seen the movie about which image sequence captured my imagination so. Or maybe it won't. Heh. But anyway, here it is. "In the Stream" (This photo is one I took on a walk a few weeks ago and has absolutely nothing to do with Girly Time except that in my brain a small element of the photo reminds me in a teeeeeny-tiny way of something I saw in Memoirs. So...back to the weekend stuff!) When we got back to Bev's house, Nancy got out a quilt she's been working on for the past few weeks. It's a Tumbling Blocks variation with pieces as small as 2 inches across. Take a look: She has some pieces sewn into long rows, but all those many, many, many long rows are pinned to a sheet so she can keep them in order and she rolled up the sheet and brought it to show us. I nagged..uh, I mean coaxed...gently coaxed, yeah, that's it...I gently coaxed Nan into lying down on it, pins and all, so I could take a photo from the stairs. Then I figured it was only fair if I got down there on the pins with her. Bev didn't wallow around on the straight pins. She was on the phone with our friend Martha and they were laughing at us. Going up the stairs reminded me to take a photo of this quilt: All those heart blocks are from a Block Shower that several of us organized for Bev a couple of years ago and that's the quilt she made from the blocks she received. Isn't it pretty? Eventually we settled downstairs to watch Project Runway and make smart-ass remarks before calling it a night. (Scroll back to Thursday's posts if you want to hear more about that.) Ok, this is probably getting too long, so we'll have a little intermission now. You go ahead and take a break. Stretch your legs. Get yourself a snack and something to drink. I'll wait. To Be Continued...