Watching Impromptu , a movie about the love affair between George Sand and Frédéric Chopin, was rather like attending my first professional writers' conference. You have an opinion of your peers based on their work, and then you meet them in real life and discover they are very different from your idealistic notions. This is not a bad thing, actually -- I don't think anyone should occupy a pedestal -- but it is disconcerting to say the least. So was this movie. The premise: Radical novelist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (Judy Davis), who lives in Paris as George Sand, falls in love first with the music of Frédéric Chopin (Hugh Grant), and then pursues the composer like a lovestruck groupie, this despite having a complicated life and string of past and present lovers creating havoc in it. Chopin, the only decent character in the entire production, is in a health decline with tuberculosis, and really just wants to be left alone. Chaos ensues as Sand chases Chopin around P...
For my first Vera Bradley upcycle project I'll start with this much loved tote in the retired Minsk Plaid pattern from 2012. It arrived with signs that it was used for quite some time and even repaired by the previous owner, which made me very happy. I like to think that person liked to mend things like me rather than buy new -- or maybe it was a thrifter who found it before me. The solid black fabric on the handle straps was added to cover wear and tears, just as I repaired another Vera bag with the same problem back in April. To prevent the straps from becoming too thick from my planned repair I'll first remove the old repair. That was actually really hard to remove, it was applied so well with hundreds of tiny machine stitches -- took me about an hour with a seam ripper. With that removed, you can see what the person who repaired the bag before me tried to cover up -- a lot of strap wear. I went to my scrap bin in search of a black solid I could use to re...