Festival application season

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the deadlines I have coming up for art festivals. The one due tomorrow is for the Dogwood Festival April 11, 12 & 13, 2014. It's one of my favorite festivals in the Atlanta area, and I'm super excited about it.

There's another app due next week for a December festival in Savannah.

This is exciting and terrifying. What if I'm accepted? What if I'm not? ah!

This painting is really appropriate. I choose to grow and fly :)

blissed out and creativity waves

Considering I did not want to leave on my one-year anniversary trip last weekend, in favor of staying home to paint, I consider my under-motivated attitude and break from art to be DONE!

I know these things are cyclical or wave-like and I understand now that creativity doesn’t leave forever. It always comes back.

So I did other things that are creative. Like writing, brainstorming and talking with Ryan about the story I’ve been writing. But you know what really helped light the fire again? I watched youtube videos of techniques, or people painting or collaging. With the simple act of using those videos as part of my “community,” I began to get the familiar ache to create. Their inspiration is catching!

The other thing I noticed was that before I watched the videos, I would feel small itches of creative ideas and motivations, and would sometimes ignore them. So it wasn’t only the videos, but also my own creativity that pushed me over into the current wave I’m in.

Fantastic!

Ryan and I celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary last weekend, and it was truly perfect. To say I was blissed out would be an understatement!

We traveled up to the North Carolina mountains on Friday to a lodge resort near Nantahala Gorge to have some adventures and alone time. We started out the afternoon on Friday, getting up to the lodge at around 5:30. We had dinner while watching the sunset over the mountains and Venus twinkling over the trees (have you tried a star-identifier app yet? It's really neat!). The food was excellent. Afterwards we headed across the street to the Kudzu bar to listen to some great bluegrass banjo. We ended the night on the front porch of the lodge snuggled on a swing built for two.

Saturday we lazed around until around noon and got up ready for some fun. We went to lunch at "River's end" which looked out over the Nantahala. Then time for adventure! Ziplining it is! I was super nervous because I didn't know what it would really involve and if I could do it. But by the end I was an expert and had a blast. Afterwards, we napped and read in the huge bed in our hotel. Once we were ready for dinner, we drove about 20 minutes into the town of Bryson City and ate at Cork&Bean, which was fantastic. 

Sunday we got up early, checked out and headed to the outpost for our rafting trip. 8 miles down the Nantahala River. I highly recommend rafting, it is so fun, relatively safe and just a great experience to be on the water feeling the rush of the current as you're taken down river. After changing from that adventure, we went to a roadside mining stop to look for goodies. We got a bunch of amethyst, some moonstone, emeralds, red jasper, moss agate, white topaz and clear quartz. I love these places because you can get a lot of really pretty stones for cheap. Then it was time to head back home. 

It was an absolutely perfect weekend, full of romance and adventure with my sweetheart.

Festival planning

This is one of my favorites. available here. And it's on sale, too!

So one of the things I decided in a previous post was to focus on festivals and not put so much pressure on my etsy site.

To that end, I made a list of some of the festivals that occur in my area and began figuring out what they required and their deadlines. There are some, like the Dogwood Festival, whose deadlines are 6 months from when they occur. Luckily those same festivals don't require full payment unless you are chosen.

These are mostly juried shows, which means there's a chance my pieces won't be selected and I won't be participating. But I can't move forward if I do nothing.