artist in residence

we spent easter weekend in cape hatteras, where my friends jenn and kristin live. jenn invited us down for the grand opening of her gallery, the blue pelican, which was saturday evening. jenn's selling some of my wire things, in addition to her own beautiful photographs and jewelry, pressed pottery, scarves knitted by a friend of hers, and the artwork of another local artist, stephanie geib. i bought a print from jenn and one from stephanie, and they both look AWESOME against my paint colors at home. we went to dinner with our friends and some of the other artists as well as the 10-year old children of jenn and kristin, chris and bailey, who were both awesome--like a mini-jenn and a mini-kristin. :) all in all, being at the gallery just made my desire to get back to doing some more artwork worse than ever! but i digress...

in addition to the art thing, we also did some tooling around on our own all over the outer banks. we found an awesome coffee shop, the dancing turtle, from which i brough home some lovely coconut creme tea. (i;ll be ordering more soon, as my friend tina is now also addicted to it!) we bought some fabulous foodie sundries from a little hidden gem of a shop called the salty gourmet. we went lighthouse hopping like true tourists--i took a bunch of pictures from the lighthouses, of course. click here if you want to check them out. we visited the lighthouses at hatteras, bodie island, and currituck, the last of which is our favorite. it was cool to see in person these places my mother always painted when i was a child. i was very proud of myself for climbing all those steps!!! we also took a long walk on the beach, which i always enjoy--if i lived at the beach, all i would do would be walk and paint! we also took some time to walk around on the dunes at jockey's ridge--i took pictures there, too, but the pictures just don't convey how amazing they really are. going there made me wish i had taken more geology in college. the thing i love about the outer banks is how it's still kind of wild, in spite of all the development there. you can just FEEL nature trying to take it all back and sweep it into the sea. it's really awe-inspiring to me. were i a woman of leisure, i would go walk the whole thing. being by the ocean always leaves me feeling peaceful. if not for the fact that it's a 6-hour drive, i would go down there more often.

being at the beach for a mere two days has me utterly fired up for the beach trip, which is coming up in only 52 days! whoo hoo! TOTALLY looking forward to that! and to think i have a trip to europe and two more weddings to go to before then--it's nice to have so much to look forward to after the past few months.