Where Bloggers Live: Movie Date Nights and DIY Valentine's Day Jewelry

Welcome back to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live! I am lucky to have joined a terrific group of bloggers who give a peek into the places and spaces where they spend their time.

Today's topic is...A Romantic Date, which is not a topic I have thought about much in recent years! But I can say that for my husband and me, date nights seem to consist primarily of pizza and a movie...which has been true from the beginning.

Our first date involved pizza and going to the movie theater to see A Nightmare Before Christmas. That was actually a very auspicious beginning because it features a love story between a soft rag-doll named Sally and a tall skinny skeleton, Jack the Pumpkin King. Other than the fact that my husband is named Robert rather than Jack, we kind of fit the general profile of these two characters. We rewatch this move in the Halloween-to-Christmas season every few years, and I'd say it's one of my favorite movies (it didn't make the very top of the list for my favorite movies post, but it faces some really stiff competition).

Our latest date night was a couple of weeks ago, when we had pizza and watched Star Wars: Episode VIII The Last Jedi on Disney+. This was actually our first viewing of this movie despite its release date in 2017! I've seen all the other previous ones in the movie theater at least once; this is the first one to watch at home for that critical first viewing. I was not disappointed to see it on the small screen but I do think it must have looked spectacular in the theater because the effects were really good. (The red dust "bleeding" up from underneath the ice crust of the planet at the end was unbelievably visually stunning, as just one example.)

Now I'm almost caught up with the Star Wars series. We need to watch Episode IX soon to wrap this thing up - so there's another date night in our near future. We'd actually rewatched the prequel Episodes I-III and the first of the sequel episodes during the last year or so in preparation to watch the last two movies. (We thought about rewatching the original three movies in between but even I remembered it so well from so many previous watchings that I didn't feel the need to.)

A stay-home movie date night feels particularly appealing during the cold Minnesota winter. It's a classic for a reason, right?

St Paul, Minnesota - 2/10/25

My husband and I spend a lot of evenings and weekends in the dining room together, where he has his Xbox set up and I have my jewelry-making station. It's a kind of "parallel play" situation that works out well for us! Here's the product of a recent jewelry-making-while-my-husband-plays-Bannerlord session...

Using the Pure Passion Curated Bead Box from February 2024 and items in my stash, I made a Valentine's Day themed jewelry set with two layering necklaces and two pairs of earrings. Yes, that was the box from last February - I hadn't made anything from it yet, and the timing was right to make some V-Day pieces with it. (Isn't it convenient that the seasons and holidays come around each year with quite a bit of predictability? Not that you'd always guess it with how often I am seemingly taken by surprise to realize that a particular holiday is happening...)

First up is the shorter of the two necklaces at 19", which is my standard length for a "short" necklace. I used the 10mm light pink rose quartz, 8mm silver drizzled glass, and 6mm red drizzled glass from the Curated Bead Box plus some dark red crystal rondelles and 6mm rose quartz beads from my stash plus the red Czech glass heart that came in the January 2025 Dollar Bead Box as my focal. I alternated between two patterns on the from of the necklace and finished up the back with a simple pattern in somewhat smaller beads.

I like that the heart bead has a copper wash on the front to pick out the flower design; I think it's totally fine to mix metals in jewelry anyway, but in this case the effect of a bit of copper tone mixed in with the silver is very understated.

Next is the longer necklace of the set, coming in at my standard 36" length for the "long" beaded chain necklace in a layered set. I used the 10mm rose quartz again plus the lovely 34mm silver filigree heart pendant in the Curated Bead Box. I filled in my beaded chain with some smaller raspberry read glass, light pink glass pearl, dark red glass, and red hearts (dyed howlite).

This is my standard technique for these long bead chain necklaces with a pendant. I create the beaded chain using simple loops (all hail the one-step looper!) that I connect directly to each other to form the two sides of the necklace. Although I sometimes will hook the last two simple loops of the beaded chain directly into the loop of the pendant, sometimes it works better to add a larger jump ring as the intersection point and have the pendant hang down a bit lower. It can make the necklace lie flat better to have an additional articulation point at the pendant, and sometimes the pendant loop is just too small for the beaded chain loops to work anyway. I used a twisted wire jump ring from my "jump rings, mixed" container to add a little extra interest. (Most of my "jump rings, mixed" are random ones that I've gotten in various Boss's Bead Bags from Fire Mountain Gems over the years. I didn't realize at the time how extremely handy it would be to have a lot of miscellaneous jump rings in various sizes, metals, shapes, and textures for use in creating necklace focals. It's a great use case for them because I only need one at a time.)

On the left is a close-up of the beaded chain where you can see that I added two little silver spacers to the top and bottom of the heart bead; because hearts are a bit of a wonky shape, that's a nice little trick for giving yourself a more standardized end point to make the loop in the wire. Especially when the bead is concave, like the top of the heart, it can be difficult to get the loop to lie in this spot nicely. On the right are the two pairs of earrings I made to coordinate with the necklaces. The top one is a very basic stacked earring with the red and silver drizzled glass beads and a light pink "marble style" glass bead from the same company. The bottom one is another very basic style that I think of as the "snowman" because you have a bead at the top (red glass like I used in the necklace) and a bead at the bottom (rose quartz) separated by a rhinestone rondelle (from the amazing package of beads my mother-in-law passed on to me in December). Now I think of the classic "snowman" earring as having a smaller top bead and larger bottom bead, but you can use two beads of the same size (here, 10mm) for a slightly less "snowman-y" look.

Thanks for joining me for a quick discussion of pizza-and-a-movie date nights and my recent jewelry creation.

Next month's topic is Spring Cleaning...yeah, I think I'm going to start laughing about that one right now.

In the meantime, visit these lovely bloggers as they share about romantic dates:

Bettye at Fashion Schlub

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks

Em at Dust and Doghair

Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings

Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style

Leslie at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After

Do you have a favorite kind of date night? Do you ever "parallel play" with someone? Do you have a preference for movies in the theater versus at home? Are you a pizza lover? Do you celebrate Valentine's Day at all? Do you like heart-motif jewelry? Do holidays, despite their regularity on the calendar, sometimes take you by surprise?

Blogs I link up with are listed here.