Beach Trip Highlights

We had a great week of relaxing, drinking, eating, beaching, pooling, cooking, reading...good times. Here are some pictures of the fun:

Here is our beach fort, it was pretty great, plenty of shade, which I took full advantage of. Also used my beach umbrella bag which worked great!

Me, under the umbrella, big floppy hat, sunglasses and SPF 50! I'm not getting burnt!

Best beach game ever, "Kubb". Google it. You set up wooden blocks and have to knock them down w/ wooden dowels. Everyone that walked by stopped to watch for a while, since most people have never seen this game before.
Pool pong. Harder than you would think. Andrew improvised a speed version which worked out pretty well. Having a pool was actually really cool. You would think it is superfluous, but we really enjoyed having another place to relax and cool off. The ocean was a little rough the first part of the week then filled w/ jellyfish the last few days.
Artsy photo!
Would love to be able to go back to the beach w/ friends and family asap, but will have to wait till next year :-(

beach trip #2

4:45 wakeup
5:30 depart
11:00 arrive in Duck
2:00 beach
4:00 check into house
5:00 poolside
10:00 bed

That was day 1. Down in the Outer Banks again, this time with friends. We rented one of those houses w/ 8 bed rooms. So far it's been pretty great. Haven't seen what the beach is like near our house yet, but the pool in the back yard is pretty awesome. This place has three refrigerators! Pictures and updates to come. Gonna test out that umbrella carrying thingy!

Ready for the beach!

I just finished my first independent sewing project, a beach umbrella bag! We are headed back down to the Outer Banks in a week with 4 other couples. When I was down a few weeks ago I had our only umbrella, which had no carrying case and was kind of a pain to carry. I also bought another umbrella knowing when we were both on the beach we would both want our own shade. To solve the problem of carrying two umbrellas I figured I could made some sort of bag. I looked up patterns for yoga mat bags and based my project after them. I wanted a draw string top and a round bottom and a strap. I sort of fudged the pattern and just did my best. The hardest part was sewing the round bottom into the tube, I didn't really know how to do this and it's got some kinks and wrinkles. So if I were to make something more refined I would have to learn how to do this correctly. But as a first project, I'm pretty proud of the result! It fits both umbrellas and looks cute :-) I'll be sure to take some pictures at the beach too!