Shirlee and Ruthie

Recently I was lucky enough to be the winner of a giveaway offered by Ranae over at Stitch by Stitch.  She had stitched Bent Creek's Photobooth Snowmen & offered the chart to one of her followers.  I was very excited to win it because I love snowman & this design just makes me smile when I look at it   : )   However, when I received it I realized that I will be needing to stitch 2 of these designs ... one for me & one for my best friend from high school, Ruthie.  Ruthie & I have a history with snowmen & whenever we give gifts to each other they are snowman related, but there's a bit more of a history here than that   : )

When we were seniors, Ruthie & I occasionally met at school in the mornings before classes began & decided to skip. Most often we skipped a couple classes, but there was a time or two when we left the school grounds & skipped the entire day. One of these days in particular stands out in my memory.  It was in the wintertime.  Both Ruthie & I loved snow.  We walked nearly 3 miles through the woods, enjoying the silence of the early morning & the snow falling down, to Fox Chapel Plaza where we caught a bus to downtown Pittsburgh & spent the day strolling through the stores & getting ourselves a cup of hot chocolate at a place called The Colonnade.  We timed things so that we were back at the Fox Chapel Plaza when the school bus for that area arrived at the nearby stop.  We then each called our mothers & told them we were at the plaza because we had mistakenly caught the wrong school bus.  We separated at that point because Ruthie lived in a totally different town than I did & our being together when our mothers came to pick us up would've raised suspicion ... lol!  Oh what a tangled web we wove   : )

On this particular day we splurged on a strip of photos from a photobooth.  I was really on the ball back then & had the smarts to write the date on the back ... December 8, 1970.  42 years ago!  Good grief! Little did we know back then what a precious gift the memory of that day would be for both of us in the future.  In the first 2 photos Ruthie is holding a note.  It's totally unreadable in the photos but it says "Come and get us Eugene!"  Eugene Bolt was the name of the assistant principal at school. He was the staff member who patrolled the halls looking for kids breaking the rules.  We gave him more than a few gray hairs, I'm sure   : )

You can see why I need to stitch 2 of these designs   : )

Thank you again Ranae ... not only for the chart but for the flood of memories it has brought back to me.  I am going to pass along Ranae's kindness & when I am finished stitching the chart I will offer it as a giveaway as well   : )