we recently tilled our garden! we rented a tiller from home depot for 4 hours, which was super easy, and got our backyard ready for spring planting. our garden plans are moving along and we hope to finish planting this week.

we realized our backyard was full of tons of random debris while tilling. we found rusty nails, roofing tiles, concrete, bricks, tools, and lots of other junk.

– ryan & gub

we noticed our horseshoe pits were looking rough recently, so we decided to give them a face-lift. we started by getting rid of the weeds and adding more sand. that alone made a huge difference. then we spray painted the poles bright colors, we went with blue and red, and topped it all off by adding our bottle cap collection.

we’ve been saving bottle caps for years, although we never really found the right use for them. gub has fond memories of her grandparents general store where they threw caps from soda bottles out front for gravel. the rusty gravel must have made an impression on her, we’ve been saving bottle caps since i’ve known her.

we’re excited to find a new use for our bottle caps! it’s gratifying to reuse something that could easily be thrown away. we plan on filling our pits a good bit more, our collection seemed a lot bigger inside the house. we are going to ask our local bartender to save bottle caps for us to help the cause.

– ryan

gub and i were able to get away for a few days and went to holden beach, nc. we took an afternoon and visited a few nearby lighthouses, which was a blast!. first we went to oak island lighthouse on caswell beach and then took a ferry to bald head island to explore old baldy lighthouse. the ferry departed from this cute little town called southport, nc, where a bunch of dawson’s creek episodes were filmed. the whole area had a new england feel, especially caswell beach and southport.

you could see what’s left of price’s creek lighthouse from the ferry ride, although that’s as close as we can could get. we weren’t able to see the inside of oak island lighthouse either, it required reservations, but we were able to climb to the top of old baldy lighthouse for a great view of bald head island!

we were very excited to learn bald head island and old baldy lighthouse were used for the beach scenes in weekend at bernies! we have since re-watched and confirmed that the beach scenes were in fact filmed there.

– ryan & gub

we celebrated easter by spending a fun morning drinking coffee and dyeing easter eggs in our new yellow kitchen. there will be a blog post on the kitchen re-do later, but here are the steps we took to create our colorful and recyclable eggs:

– hard boil eggs
– set up easter egg dye kit (we used a cheap grocery store paas kit)
– add stencils and resists to the eggs*
– stir dye bath and carefully place egg in the dye
– leave egg in the dye for 5 to 10 minutes (lighter colors take longer)
– remove from dye and remove stencil or resist
– place eggs in basket or nest (we used shredded paper scraps for our grass!)

*we created leaf stencils by picking small leaves from our yard and placing them on the egg. we then tightly wrapped panty hose around the egg and secured with a rubber band. small, thin leaves with few veins work best for the stencils. we also used electrical tape to add stripes and lines to the eggs.

yay easter!

deviled eggs for dinner!

– ryan & gub

spring is finally here! we’re excited about the warm weather and spring blooms. here are some photos of the japanese magnolia in our front lawn. it was a valentine’s day gift from gub a few years ago.

– ryan & gub

today is the 6th anniversary of our first date! how time flies. to celebrate, here is a time-lapse of our wedding ceremony up in the georgia mountains!

– ryan & gub

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gub set up a facebook page for our blog. you can find the link over on the right side bar. i think we now have our social networking covered.

– ryan

i recently found some time-lapse projects i thought were lost in one of our robberies. here is the hand.craft.it festival that i curated with gub and our friend kristen. i filmed the event from start to finish to try and portray the amount of work involved in a one-day craft festival.

– ryan

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i filmed the snow melting on our back deck after the recent snow storm. the camera went for 3 days and i put together this time-lapse piece from the footage.

– ryan

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last december we went to our friends doug & lizzy’s wedding in florida. it was a nice celebration with our good friends. doug is currently studying organic farming in england and lizzy recently graduated from edinburgh college of art. so sadly, we rarely see them these days. at their wedding, we enjoyed meeting a lot of their great friends from england, scotland, ireland, and germany.

many of the edinburgh folks either worked for or played in bands at the wee red bar, which is the bar/club on the grounds of the edinburgh college of art. my brother and i worked for the club downunder, the campus bar/club at florida state university, so it was interesting to hear about the scottish equivalent. the wee red bar has been open for 20 years and is a happening venue in edinburgh. they feature both local bands and national acts, art brut and green day have played there.

the wee red bar recently put out a dvd called the art school dance. it was filmed over two days during edinburgh college of art’s centenary year and features twenty live performances by students, graduates and friends of edinburgh college of art. both the dvd and its packaging are really great, be sure to check out the trailer below.

– ryan & gub

wee red bar

edinburgh college of art
lauriston place
edinburgh EH3 9DF
united kingdom
+44 131 229 1003