Ben's Stag!

Ben - The WhizBang Shufflers' mandolin player - is getting married in two weeks, so Luke, Curt, & I - the rest of the band - kidnapped him for a bachelors' weekend.

Ben seemed pleasantly surprised to see us show at his fiancee's house, completely up out of the blue and with our instruments in tow. Apparently he thought we'd just come by for an impromptu evening jam. He then seemed pleasantly stunned when we told him that besides fetching his mandolin, he'd better pack a toothbrush too because we were going to be gone for longer than just an evening. I don't think he wasn't expecting an out of town stag party.

Once we'd crammed our instruments, our food, and ourselves into Luke's car, we headed out to Luke's family's cottage in Nopiming Provincial Park. After a downing four massive T-bone steaks - and I mean massive - we jammed for a while around a camp fire. Strangely enough, we didn't play a single tune from the band's repertoire, we just jammed on other tunes as they came to mind. I think we may have even gotten all the way through one or two of them, otherwise we had a little trouble remembering lyrics and such. Much fun, none the less!

The next day, after sleeping in most of the morning, we chowed down on a breakfast of bacon & eggs, and toast. Then we seriously got down to business: We shot a movie.

Using the things we had on hand at the cottage, we created a live-action short movie entitled "The Stag". From start to finish we spent less than a day making it. It was conceived and shot over two hours on Saturday afternoon. It was edited Saturday evening. Finally, all the sound was recorded on Sunday afternoon. The project was complete!

Now, for your viewing pleasure, here is our movie. Enjoy... but be warned, there is some mature subject matter; it's a stag film after all.




RICK

2 Project-of-the-Month Instructables!!

Last month Instructables.com held a contest for the best instructables posted on their site during the month of March. I submitted two projects: Easter Eggs Dyed With Onion Skins and Microwavable Mitten Warmers. Both of them won!! They are two of ten projects chosen as Project of the Month!

I was hoping one of them might win something, but to have both of them win is way awesome!! Now winning Project of the Moth is basically winning second place. First place goes to five projects deemed Outstanding Project of the Month.

But these titles are nothing to sneeze at. The ten Project of the Month winners (of which I am two, I guess) win a Leatherman Juice S2 multi-tool & an Instructables T-shirt. The Leatherman is custom laser engraved with "Instructables". How cool is that, eh?!

The five outstanding winners have their Leathermans upgraded to the Juice KF4 multi-tool.

There are also twenty-five honourable mentions who will receive just a Instructables T-shirt, but no Leatherman tool. Frankly that's what I figured my Easter Egg project might win... if I was lucky.

By the way, I am totally stoked with how many people have followed my instructions for using onions skins to colour Easter Eggs! They've left comments with links to pictures of the eggs they've made, including one person who posted a follow-up instructable this month showing how to use fern fronds & flowers between the onion skins & the eggs to leave a cool shadow of the objects.

I was fortunate to have both Make and Treehugger post links to my projects; that dramatically increased traffic to them. Treehugger had an especially cool write-up by Kyeann Sayer, (St. Petersburg, Russia) about my mitten warmers!

RICK