Beading, Dancing, Tea Party, Oh My!

Ok, so I have, admittedly, been a bit distracted this week.  The reason?  I'll tell you why next time.  For now, let's rewind back to Wednesday.

I got up super early to bake some more Southern Belles and make iced tea in anticipation of my best friends coming over to spend a good part of the day with each other.  I wanted us to have something sweet to eat and good to drink.  I did say, after all, that maybe the next time I had friends over, I would make the Southern Belles again to have a tea party with them.  I changed the recipe a bit from the first time I made them, and I think I liked it a bit better.  Give me a couple of weeks to get down off the sugar high they gave me, and I'll make them again for you, this time with the recipe and how-to pictures to go along with it.

When they got here, we sat down and started beading.  That had been the plan for the day.  Teaching each other new tricks, trading beads, and sharing stories.  It was fun to laugh and create with them, and we made some beautiful things.  Rings and bracelets and earrings flew from our finger tips, and I learned some things that I didn't know about beading before.  We were quite blessed, you see, to have two beading experts sitting at the table with us.

Then we moved on to dancing.  My friends have been to group dances before where it seems they teach all sorts of different dances.  We started out by teaching each other a simple swing dance, which I was ecstatic for ( more correctly, my friends taught me a simple swing while I played us some jazz music ).  Over the past few months I have begun to discover that I love jazz, and with it has come a strong desire to learn to swing dance.  So you can imagine how much fun I had.  Or maybe not, because I was pretty dam happy ( do you see the Percy Jackson reference? ) over something that might seem a bit odd to you ( either way, you should listen to this song because it's really quite addicting ).

We needed more room than the inside of the house could provide, some we went out into the hot summer afternoon to dance barefoot in the grass.  We danced the Patty Cake Polka, a country line dance that I sadly can not remember the name of, and the Celtic Cross, in which we had to drag our mothers into the ring to have enough people to do it.  It made it all the more fun.

We had some confusion as we danced, partly due to the fact that half of us had never done the dances before, and partly due to the fact that we were all girls.  We frequently had to stop dancing and start some parts over because we forgot who was supposed to be dancing the guy's part.  A lack of young men can sometimes be a troublesome thing.  We easily wore ourselves out and were back inside to eat sandwiches and guzzle iced tea.

And so our sweet summer day went.  Now I can hear you yelling through your computer screen at me.  "Where are the pictures, Em?!  We want to see you beading and, more importantly, tripping as you tried to dance."  And I do so apologize for the lack of pictures in this post, I truly do.  But I was having too much fun to remember to take pictures.

I will show you the earrings I made, though.  They are awful pictures taken in awful lighting, but I hope they will do to help make up for me forgetting to take any other pictures.  I will try harder next time.

Em