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i love trains.

I don’t know when it started. Maybe with my brother’s model train. Or with the family Amtrak ride we took from Kansas City to St. Louis when I was a kid. But I absolutely love the sight of a train chugging down the tracks. There’s something about it that’s nostalgic and wonderful and industrial all at the same time.

There are train tracks right beside my office (the brick building), which means at least once a day we hear the whistle and rumble of the train going by.

I keep telling myself that I’ll take another ride one day.

why greenville?

I recently created a Pinterest board full of my favorite things about Greenville, SC. It’s not a comprehensive guide to the city — or even an unbiased one. It’s just my opinion of what makes Greenville awesome.

I’ll be adding to it regularly and I hope it’s a helpful tool to start exploring the city, whether you’re planning a visit, considering a move, or already live here. Enjoy!

learning, just because.

I have a fairly long list of skills I’d like to learn ‘one day’, and this weekend I finally made progress on one of them by taking a (free!) knitting class at the library.

My project at the end of class. Wobbly, but better than I would have done figuring it out on my own!

The sad part is that I really can’t remember how long it’s been (if ever) that I learned something in a group setting just for fun. Here, my only motivation is to learn something — not to earn a grade or be the best at it — but because I want to learn. Plus, after years of following online tutorials and trying to figure things out by myself, the experience of learning alongside others is just really fun.

life in greenville.

I spent part of my Saturday working on the Life In Greenville project, an idea that was first introduced to me over 2 years ago. I remember this because 1) it was also the day I met most of the (now) CoWork crew, and 2) at the time, I was the only person in the room without a Twitter account (which was remedied shortly thereafter).

I’m very excited about this project, partially because of the way it’s taken place. The idea itself: Use our talents to create a good looking website for Greenville. One whose design more accurately represents the city we live in than the existing ‘official’ Greenville sites. In short, help outsiders realize how great Greenville is.

Fantastic site design by Jeremy of Headlamp Creative in progress

Because everyone stays busy with their own projects and jobs, nothing usually comes of ideas like this — no matter how great they are. But CoWork planned a hack-a-thon/design-a-thon for this weekend to make sure the idea didn’t get neglected. Organizational meetings, content writing, design, illustration, development, and everything else it takes to build a website was done by a team of about 2 dozen people working off and on over a few days. The entire project was built by people who love Greenville.

CoWork Greenville headquarters

There will, of course, be bugs and improvements to be made after the fact, but if you know anything about website building, you know how amazing it is to create a full site from scratch in such a short amount of time — not to mention a responsive site that looks amazing on any device. It shows what amazing talent exists in the Greenville web community.

The developers writing their various languages and doing what they do.

I did a tiny bit of content writing and a some design support — helping select and resize images to fit the amazing site design. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I feel privileged to be part of this project even in a small way.

The site launches later today, so check out LifeinGreenville.com to see the final product!

All photos courtesy of Life in Greenville.

the story of our city.

One of my favorite things about Greenville is that we have people who know how to make things happen. Whether it’s Greenville Forward and their community-sourced idea generator What If Greenville, the folks at CoWork (more on them later), or one of the many small businesses and restaurants, Greenvillians are definitely not sitting still.

CityStory is one of the latest and greatest things happening in our town. Instead of talking about the fact that Greenville should have a coffee table book that shows off our city — these folks went out and made it. Not only that, it looks like they’ve done it well — a crucial factor in the success of any venture.

This team of writers, artists, and photographers set out to share the story of Greenville, South Carolina through words and photography. The final product is a beautiful monochromatic hard-bound book. You can see a sneak peek on their site, or check out a few of the spreads below.

Preview spreads from the book, Greenville — Imprints of a City

This project not only capitalizes on our city pride, it tells the story behind the buildings we see every day. CityStory has also produced some really beautiful videos using imagery from the book and interviews from locals. Even though I’ve spent hours digging through old pictures of Greenville online and reading about its past, I can’t wait to pick up this book and learn more about the city I already love.

If you want to check it out in person, the official book launch party is this Friday at art & light. Details are below!

CityStory Greenville Launch Party
Friday, December 2, 2012
art & light gallery, from 6-9pm
Pendleton St. in West Greenville

winning.

If you’re a business owner or an artist, don’t miss this opportunity! Indie Craft Parade is giving away two ad spaces on the blog for the month of December. It’s very easy to enter and winners will be chosen next Friday the 25th!

Find out more info here.

keep it local.

A few weeks ago some friends and I headed up the road to Asheville, NC. The main reason for our trip was to meet Grace of D*S at her book signing there. We had so much fun exploring the city and checking out the shops, galleries and restaurants before we headed over to the bookstore. (If you want to see where all we went, look for more photos at Erin’s blog.)

Asheville has always had a strong ‘buy local’ movement (see examples of their campaigns below), but I was excited to see a new ‘Local is the new Black’ promotion around town. Beautiful silver screenprinted posters stand out against shop windows all over town.

Various Asheville Grown Business Alliance (AGBA) Campaigns as seen around town. Photo credits clockwise from top right: alicia.pimental / briface / ello lovey / Ron Gunzburger

It’s a great reminder as we head into the holidays. Every city has independent retailers struggling to make ends meet, and we can choose to support them and our local economy with our purchases.

If you’re not sure where to start, there’s a growing movement that can help. The 3/50 Project has been very instrumental for me in demonstrating exactly what kind of impact buying local can have. From their website:

“For every $100 spent in locally owned independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. If you spend that money in a national chain, only $43 stays here. Spend it online and nothing comes home.”

The basic idea behind their project is to encourage consumers to pick 3 local businesses whose doors they would be sad to see close, and commit to spend $50 (total) each month at these stores. This is a great campaign with a very worthy mission.

I’ve seen a sign online that says “If you really want to occupy Wall Street, do your holiday shopping at a small independent merchant.” While I don’t know if that’s the entire answer, it’s definitely a good start! Support your local businesses this holiday season — whether that’s an artist or a restaurant or shop owner in your city. Think of creative ways to give gifts that support others in your community.

more Brooklyn Beta.

The sign outside the front door was handpainted. Not the first clue it was going to be awesome.

While the conference days were really laid back and the schedule was flexible, the event was extremely well-planned and executed. You could tell the organizers worked hard to make everything special and comfortable for us. Well, as comfortable as you can feel in a room full of people you don’t know. I did my best to be social, but it was also nice to retreat back to the Greenville crew now and again.

Greenville has a really talented web community (many of whom are part of CoWork, where Andrew works). In spite of the small size of the conference (there were about 250 attendees), there were a good number of Greenville designers and developers there. Serious kudos to these (and others) who are putting Greenville on the map when it comes to quality web.

Speaking of quality, check out these pillows in the hang out area.

Our friends Mark and Paul gave a demo of their project Coursebook.

Andrew wearing his name badge. Us being somewhat anti-social.

 
A couple things I really really loved about this conference:

· Each attendee was given a name badge that had a custom bio written by the organizers. I have no idea how long it took Chris and Cameron to research and write these, but you can’t make things much more personalized than that!

· The speakers weren’t announced beforehand, which might have been a drawback for any other conference. But considering the rave reviews from last year and the quality of everything else, I didn’t think twice about it. It was actually really refreshing to sit down, not knowing what was coming next. I hope to share more about the content of the presentations and discussions, but for now I’m still processing everything.

· This conference was all about bringing the social media connections into the real world. Which means there wasn’t free internet. From the event email:

“Like last year, we will not be providing Internet access at the conference. We see this as a feature, not a bug. You’re of course welcome to use your fancy phones and other devices that can talk to the Internet without our help.”

People still used their phones and computers to access the internet, but in a crowd of heavy Twitter users, I thought it was relatively rare. Real conversations were taking place and most people were engaged during the presentations, not surfing the internet or busy tweeting profound tidbits. 

· Both lunch and dinner were provided for us on all three days of the conference. What I loved most about this is that we were introduced to even more great local Brooklyn food without even leaving the building. Personally, my favorites were the sweets. Pies from One Girl Cookie and unbelievable cookies from FattyCakes.

After this, the bar for conferences has definitely been set high. I took notes, and left inspired to make my corner of the world a better place.

a walk in the park.

It’s been way too long since Andrew and I had our photo taken, so last weekend we headed to some of our favorite Downtown spots with our new friend Katie Stewart. Katie is a writer and photographer who moved to Greenville not too long ago, and we had lots of fun hanging out in Greenville’s downtown parks together.

I picked out two of my favorite photos to share here, but you can see more at Katie’s photo blog.

If you need photos taken, I definitely recommend Katie! Her rates are very reasonable and we felt comfortable enough to be ourselves with her, even in front of a camera.

My favorite part? Seeing how well she captured how much fun Andrew and I have together.

a parade of goodness.

Here’s a glimpse of the wonderful things we brought home from Indie Craft Parade last weekend. I had much more time to shop this year and it was wonderful! Along with these goodies for us, we bought several gifts I’m really excited about (but can’t share of course). Here’s what I can show you:

Clockwise from top: port wine caramel sauce from Sweeteeth / fingerless gloves and a cozy cowl by erin elizabeth (I’m so much more excited about these than I look!) / stitched cards from Common Thread / handmade collar for Riley from Tree Parlor / owl ornament from Once Again Sam*

Not pictured (but things I can still share): leather clutch from Sew Few / bag with leather handles from lightnest / grey braided leather bracelet from Happylooks / What if Greenville poster from Shed Labs

*I know this photo is blurry, but I could barely get a clear picture of the owl since Riley thought it was a toy for her and kept trying to eat it in one gulp. I love they way they’re looking at each other here!