Wedgwood’s storied history as an iconic creator of beautiful ceramics art is the focus of American Spirit‘s September/October issue.

In 1759, Josiah Wedgwood, an apprentice potter in England, left his job at an established potter’s workshop and opened his own pottery business. This year, to celebrate its 250th anniversary, Wedgwood will join the DAR Museum as it presents a new exhibition, “Wedgwood: 250 Years of Innovation and Artistry” from October 3 through February 27, 2010. Our story illustrates the legacy of a talented visionary and encourages visitors to check out the exhibit, which will feature 200 diverse pieces dating from the 1700s to today.

Summer was wonderful in so many ways (kayaking! filmmaking! travels out West!), but I can’t wait for fall. One reason? Megan Morris and I are taking a photography class at a nearby art school in a couple of weeks. I even have new school supplies! Yep, this shiny new (used) camera is taunting me with all its buttons that I don’t yet know how to use. I expect the class to help me unlock the potential of the camera, and I hope it gets me just a tiny bit closer to the photographic talents of Hammock friends like the other wonderful Summer I know.

Ready to shoot some autumn leaves—bring ’em on!

Quiet on the Set! Cameras rolling. Scene 1, Take 1. Action!

If you’re an avid movie fan like me, you might harbor a secret desire to utter those lines on an actual film set. I got to be just that lucky recently as part of a team competing in the 48 Hour Film Project, a nationwide contest challenging amateur filmmakers across the country to write, film, edit and complete a short (five- to seven-minute) movie. All of it–from concept to execution–has to take place within 48 hours. Each team is randomly assigned a genre, ranging from buddy pic to horror flick, and all teams have certain elements (a character, line of dialogue and prop) that are required in the final film.

Friends in the illustrious (and award-winning) team Fighting With Forks invited me to be a part of the Nashville competition July 17-19. I didn’t even ask what they wanted me to do, that’s how fast I said yes.

The 48 hours we spent getting to know each other and working hard to tell a compelling story were intense but great fun. Our two days together roughly went like this: Around 6 p.m. on Friday, the entire team gathered to hear our chosen genre (fantasy) and the required elements chosen randomly for our city’s competition (an actor named Charles or Charlene Little, a still camera as a prop and the line of dialogue, “I’m trying to decide.”) We spend a few hours brainstorming possible storylines, ranging from the ridiculous (foreshadowing!!) to the sublime.

Around 10 p.m., the four writers got down to business, magically churning out a script by the wee hours of the morning (around 3:30–ouch). Here’s the story they concocted: “A man has an epiphany where he thinks that he’s Death. He goes to a therapist to hash out his recent revelation, telling stories from his youth and recent events. He lives with his goth girlfriend, Charlene Little, who is an actress/photographer also obsessed with death. In the end, after sharing several fantastical stories about people and animals dying in his presence, he realizes that his therapist, too, has keeled over.”

The director of photography and his production assistant took the script and drew storyboards until the sun came up to prepare for the next day’s filming. The entire team was due on set at 7 a.m., and everyone (director, DOP, actors, lighting director, cameraman, audio guy, boom mic operator, et. al) spent the entire day–until 11 p.m.–filming. We ate lunch and dinner standing up, with one hand on a slice of pizza while the other hand jotted down notes, set up the next scene or put on makeup. While we filmed, three prodigiously talented musicians wrote original music to go with the script, ending up with an entire album’s worth of songs.

Next, our editor took the miles of raw materials and, along with the director, DOP and a writer, spent hours upon hours shaping the film. (Sleep is for sissies had to be their motto.) The film’s title–“Now You’re Being Ridiculous”–didn’t come until sometime mid-afternoon. By 6 p.m. (an hour early!), the finished product was dropped off.

Satisfied with the ridiculous story told, all the players slept happily ever after.

Postscript: We won best overall film! Watch it here.

Space is a premium in most magazines, but filling up all available nooks and crannies on a page is rarely the best design solution. To give your design a little room to breathe and to keep a reader focused on what’s most important about a layout, the most effective choice is often wide-open white space.

Hammock is enjoying the not-so-lazy days of summer—growing bountiful gardens and catching up on our book lists. The July/August issue of American Spirit, the national magazine we publish for the Daughters of the American Revolution, offers hints for planning another favorite summer activity: family reunions.

It’s no surprise that American Spirit, with its focus on the early American period, regularly features the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) on our pages. And it’s not surprise that editing this magazine for the DAR has really fed into my history geekiness. So, when friends invited me on a long weekend tour of three presidents’ homes in the Charlottesville, Va., area, I pretty much jumped at the nerd-cation* chance.

Our first stop was James Madison’s Montpelier, which recently unveiled the stunning results of a four-year restoration. American Spirit featured the ambitious project in a July/August 2005 article. We focused on the meticulous way the Montpelier Foundation chose to restore the home of the Father of the Constitution. Not long after Madison died in 1836, his wife, Dolley, sold the home, and it went through extensive changes by multiple owners before finally passing into the hands of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Instead of freezing the home as it was when first acquired, the National Trust decided to strip away two centuries of renovations and preserve the house as close as possible to the way it was when Madison retired from the White House.

It’s one thing to read about the restoration, but it’s another thing to see the impressive results of this project for myself. Montpelier’s Classical portico and its imposing columns have been restored to Madison’s day. And get this: The ink stains are still visible on the floor in the study where he wrote the Constitution! Guides describe finding a fragment of a letter with Madison’s handwriting in a rat’s nest and uncover other details found in the process of peeling back the home’s many layers.

Beyond the archaeological finds, the home’s setting is idyllic, offering a gorgeous vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

We finished off the day in Charlottesville’s historic downtown at night, where we added our screeds to the free speech wall and drove by the Thomas Jefferson-designed rotunda at the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1819.

The next morning we visited Jefferson’s masterpiece of design: Monticello. The almost-too-efficient tour guide whisked us through the house rather quickly, but we still managed to check out some of his one-of-a-kind inventions, from a copying machine to a compass/weather vane contraption to a wine dumbwaiter. Since American Spirit detailed Thomas Jefferson’s penchant for gardening in our “Gardening the Founding Fathers’ Way” story (March/April 2006), I was eager to see his carefully arranged rows of vegetables and learn more about his experimental crops. Jefferson’s 5,000 acres of orchards, vineyards, fields and gardens were worked by hundreds of enslaved and some free workers, and the Plantation Community Tour explained the daily life of some of those slaves.

We squeezed in a quick visit to James Monroe’s Ash Lawn–Highland where the fifth president lived from 1799 to 1823. It’s now operated by the College of William and Mary, Monroe’s alma mater. (Stay tuned for American Spirit’s upcoming story on this historic college.) The home is packed with 18th- and 19th-century furnishings, some from Napoleon’s France, where Monroe served as ambassador. Most know a little about the Monroe Doctrine and that his presidency was called the “era of good feelings,” but I was surprised to discover what a well-regarded politician (oxymoron?) he was during his lifetime.

Back in D.C. on Memorial Day, we waved hello to No. 44 at the White House and swung by a few monuments on the National Mall, including the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, where we were inspired by military nurse’s speech about her service in Vietnam, Iraq and now Germany. The weekend ended with a four-hour tour (yes, and I could have stayed longer) of the interactive Newseum, a must-see museum for current event junkies and newshounds in the shadow of the Capitol.

Next on my to-do list: Learn more about Dolley Madison. What a fab first First Lady!

*nerdcation. Pronunciation: /nərd ˈkā-shən /. Function: noun. Date: 2009: A journey offering great potential for expanding one’s vocabulary, Trivial Pursuit ability and storehouse of random knowledge and/or cocktail conversation.

The monsoon season we’ve been experiencing lately here at Hammock HQ couldn’t keep me inside last weekend. I decided to dive in and embrace middle Tennessee’s lakes and waterways by actually becoming ONE with them. Who knew you could have so much fun when there’s water, water everywhere … even without a boat or a paddle.

On Saturday I joined a group of volunteers for a big cleanup day at Percy Priest Lake as part of the Nashville Clean Water Project. One of the supporters of the well-organized event was the Cumberland River Compact, an educational nonprofit that promotes the water quality of the Cumberland River watershed. We dodged the thunderstorms and managed to pick up a ton of the usual trash—glass and plastic bottles, aluminum cans, Styrofoam containers—and a few unusual (and disgusting) items—a tent, camp chairs, wheels, camouflage underwear (I KNOW). Recycling champion and green blogger Barbara Mathieson posted a video of the event here.

On Sunday, I competed in my first triathlon, the Lost Loon, benefitting the Harpeth River Watershed Association, another great nonprofit devoted to preserving and restoring one of our area’s beautiful waterways. It feels cool to say I’m a triathlete, but that moniker is a little bit misleading. It was the lowest stress team triathlon you can imagine: 9-mile bike ride, 2-mile canoe race, 4-mile trail run, and I just participated in the bike and run portions of the race. Because of the deluge of rain we’ve been having, Lone Hunter State Park’s Couchville Lake rose to meet us: In portions of the trail, we ended up wading in water up to our shins. But once you’re that wet, it just gets more fun. One of the best parts about the race was crossing the finish line: Race organizer extraordinaire Willy Stern required all finishers to squeeze a loon stuffed animal that was hidden in a tree. Join Willy and friends–and me!–for the seventh annual event next year!

P.S. What am I like when I DO have a boat and a paddle? Not too smooth, lemme tell you. Late last fall, friends and I paddled down Swan Creek, a winding and gorgeous creek not too far from Nashvillle. Things started off grand … until my canoe partner and I got caught in a strainer and sank our lil boat. Luckily we were rescued by the kind experts at the Tennessee Scenic Rivers Association (TSRA). I’m hopeful that by enrolling in one of TSRA’s future paddling classes, I can keep future waterlogging to a minimum.

We’re Shaker crazy here at Hammock. Not only does the May/June issue of American Spirit feature a cover story on the restoration of the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village in New Lebanon, N.Y., but Jamie recently paid a visit to the beautifully restored Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. (Read about her trek to Kentucky here.)

I first heard about the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill near Lexington when American Spirit featured Kentucky in its travel section a few years ago. With the Shakers as the cover story of our May/June issue, I decided it was time to pay a visit to America’s largest restored Shaker community for a firsthand look at a utopian way of life.

The Shakers lived by the saying, “Hands to work, hearts to God.” But as one of Pleasant Hill’s costumed guides remarked, their motto also could have been: “Work smarter, not harder.” Many of the artifacts on display in the living history museum (made up of 34 restored buildings in the middle of 3,000 acres of farmland) were labor-saving devices, which the Shakers did not patent, freely sharing with the world. (Although their claims to be inventors of the clothespin and circular saw are unlikely, their dumbwaiters and flat brooms and kitchen gadgets were models of efficiency.) Even some Shaker barns were built on slopes so that hay could be pitched downward instead of upward. Smart choice if you’ve ever shoveled out a barn!

The goods they sold to the “outside world,” from packaged seeds to classic furniture, were known for their reliability and craftsmanship. However … even though there’s evidence that their formula for house paint lasted more than 100 years, I’m not sure I’d like the idea of pulverized brick mixed with animal blood slathered on my walls.

Pleasant Hill does a great job bringing the Shakers’ principles to vivid life. I was mesmerized by craftspeople demonstrating Shaker techniques, from woodworking to spinning and weaving to broom making. (Tip: always hang your broom so the bristles don’t get bent.) And the village farm, with its heirloom vegetables and historic animal breeds, offered a hands-on look at the importance of agriculture to the Shakers. Actually, the farm might have been my favorite part of the community: I loved that Percheron horses are still used to till the gardens, English sheep are still shorn for their wool and Dominique chickens provide the eggs served at the Inn’s dining room. (Ok, it made me laugh, but I didn’t exactly love that one of the wily goats grabbed and ate half my map.)

Pay the Shaker community a visit if you’re ever up in bluegrass country. And be a pal and bring me back some homemade corn sticks and Shaker lemon pie.

I’m still processing all the lessons learned from my recent trip to Haiti. Five of us Nashvillians traveled there to visit friends, find out a little more about the country and help out where we could. Don’t get me started talking about how much I loved the journey. Just count yourself lucky all I’m doing here is posting a few pics.

Here we are after cleaning out mud from a school in the Gonaives area struck by September 2008’s devastating hurricanes. After initial shyness, several of the village kids helped out in a big way and taught us a few things about swinging shovels.

We re-roofed a house damaged in those same storms. (And yes, believe it or not, there are shots of me successfully using a power saw without harming myself or others. In a skirt, no less.)

We met adorable children, who laughed at our bungling attempts to speak Creole. And while entertaining said children (one day, they numbered 300!) with tons of balloons, bubbles and soccer balls, we, by necessity, learned how to speak their language a little bit better.

Yes, we witnessed some great needs in Haiti. But we came away with memories of a lot more beauty than we ever expected.

To learn more about the work of the Haiti Water Project, one of the efforts we witnessed making a big difference in the everyday lives of people, take a minute to watch this video.