Sunday, March 11, 2012

Welcome

to Life in the Shop
This is where you can discover all of the things that make us tick.  What inspires us, what feeds us, what we see...   Everything that makes up all the juju that goes into every product that we make in the Rinse workshop.

You'll get to hear from more than just me (Heather) too.  I'm sure some other folks will chime in every now and again with their latest & greatest.

To get us started, we pulled all of our non-directly related to Rinse posts over to this blog.  You'll find the archive from here back.  Never to fear if you're looking for lots of info on Rinse products, ingredients we use, shows we do... just click here and it will take you to the official Rinse Blog.

We hope you like our slight reorganization of the blog.  We want to declutter a little so you can find what you want when you want it.  We also hope you enjoy getting to know us a little better.

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Thursday, July 28, 2011

Bird Sanctuary…

No, it’s just my house & I love it.  It’s just another day of National Geographic at our humble abode.  Lots of animals including squirrels (and you know me and my Bob,) deer, lizards, birds…  Yes there are a lot of birds and after this spring there are even more flying around thanks to what we have lovingly dubbed the maternity ward.

Here we have an overflowing nest of baby Titmouse birds (strange name I know) that was strategically placed in the trussing of our back deck.  I had been asking Damyn to get a picture of the baby birds for a week or so & I finally convinced him to do it.  Needless to say about .01 seconds after this picture was taken 5 little birds took their 1st flight scaring Damyn half to death and really irritating the momma bird that was perched on a nearby branch.  I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants!
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Next up was a nest of Cardinals in our blueberry bush.  Luckily they left the nest before the berries ripened & we were disturbing them too much.  These guys were only a few days old, still bald & not opening their eyes.
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And last but not least, the Blue Birds.  And yes, that is my mailbox!  So the door to the mailbox doesn’t shut and momma Blue Bird was busy stuffing all sorts of pine straw in the mailbox for her nest.  We pulled the nest out to the front of the mailbox to catch this picture.  I felt so bad for momma bird though.  Every time we got to a certain point in our driveway she would fly out AND whenever we got to a certain point in the road to turn into the driveway, out she would come.  We did come to a great agreement with our very understanding mail-lady.  She hung our mail in a bag on our flag until the maternity ward that was our mailbox was vacant.
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Needless to say, a mailbox that closes & birdhouses are on our to-do lists before next spring.

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Thursday, July 21, 2011

Our first Spring in Monroe, GA

If you’ve followed Rinse or this blog at all over the last year you know that we moved last July from Woodstock, GA to Monroe, GA (about 75 miles) from suburbia to rural’ia.  Now I’m a city girl, always have been & always will have a good piece of it in me, but there’s nothing like a country spring.
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At the top are the little yellow wildflowers (alright, they’re probably weeds but wildflowers just sound so much better) that covered our front yard (also big enough that it is lovingly known as the pasture & hence not mowed quite as much as a yard would be.)
Then from left to right are:
  • Blooming grapevines (that produced grapes so sour last season that we didn’t do anything but look at how cool they looked)
  • Fig leaves budding & little baby figs (what we didn’t know was that this first batch of itty bitty figs would quickly die off.  We felt like horrible fig parents, but then a month or so later more baby figs than ever showed up… success!)
  • Raspberry blooms
We were very blessed that all of the above were here when we moved in & that we’ve been able to keep everything alive & thriving.  I’m learning to be a country girl quickly while weeding, watering & nurturing all of these little baby fruits to maturity… all for us to eat them!  Figgy Pudding anyone???

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Monday, July 11, 2011

Strawberries Ripe for the Picking

As much as I wanted to keep up with blogging in “real time” we’re just going to have to settle for a slight delayed reaction/recap of our Spring. 

About 6 weeks ago the red goodness of strawberries were in full swing.  We’re lucky enough to have Washington Farms (in Loganville, GA) just right up the road from us & they have acres upon acres of the sweet berry goodness.  We just had to get us some and here’s how it went…

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Here’s what we accomplished.  These 2 buckets turned into 12 jars of homemade jam & lots of frozen little treats for smoothies & snacking.
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My favorite pictures are those that contain little red berry stained fingers.

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Monday, May 30, 2011

I Love my DODO!!!

 I got my iPad (first generation) a couple of months ago... and surprise surprise, I love it!  I don't know what I would do without it.  Actually I would just have to put up with my soon to be bombed laptop more.

Even though I love my iPad, I needed something to keep it undercover for many reasons.  1.  The 5 year old that lives with me.  2.  There's a reason none of our products are packaged in glass... I'm a klutz.  3.  I hate being "that girl walking around with her iPad."



Enter the DODOCase (with an awesome name too.)  It turned my iPad into a book.  Being a texture girl, it feels great & is super easy to carry.  It turns my iPad into a subtle accessory.  And well, I just love it!

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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Top 5: Chickens cont. – The Flock

So many chickens, so many different colors of eggs, so little space in the coop.  With the additions that we made to the coop plans, we should be able to comfortably house 5 chickens (my plan was to start out with 3 but I wanted to make sure they had plenty of space.)

I found a woman literally a mile up the road that has a backyard flock and she was selling baby chicks so I loaded up the family to pick out some chickens. 

We got three little peeps (Ameraucana, Buff Orpington & a Black Australorp.)  If you look and count closely, you’ll see that there are four little peeps in some of the pictures.  That’s because 2 days after picking up our three, I was instructed by my dear husband that we should check to see if the Silkies had hatched.  They did, and we loaded up again to pick up our fourth chick.  Here is the family portrait.

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Friday, May 20, 2011

Mud & Crud – Now these kids could have used some soap

I warned you a while back that my dear hubby has a camera & shoots some pretty cool (at times slightly irrelevant) things.  And you can bet money if there is a light pole around it’ll be in one of his pictures.

He’s been exploring the world of action photography a little these days, but not your typical baseball or football types of sports.  Keeping in-line with what we do and where we came from, he chose to practice on what else other than mud.  Yes, mud.

Our church’s youth group had a fantastically fun & very muddy event this past week named Mud & Crud (very fitting) in Loganville.  Since the event is a little hard to explain I’ll let the action pictures do the talking.

The mud courtesy of the Walton County Fire Department:
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Just making sure it’s deep enough:

The rest of the good clean fun (tug o’ war, shaving cream, flour…)

The Walton County Fire Department cleaning up their mess:

 

Hmmm… maybe we should look at sponsoring this event next year.


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