Board & Brush, Prescott

I’ve said it many times before, do what you love and enjoy every day.

With all this isolation and stress in our lives, it’s more important than ever to do things for yourself and what you enjoy.

While John and I do a lot of our own projects, we rarely solicit or participate in DIY kits or workshops. Drastic times, call for drastic actions – it was time for a get away, and a little fun! So we opted to do “Board & Brush” in Prescott.

You’ve likely heard of those Paint & Sip kinds of workshops where you pick a project and the host / proprietor teaches you how to create your masterpiece. Board & Brush is the same sort of workshop, but with signs – sayings on distressed wood.

We were surprised when we got there that the boards were a very blond pine wood. Bailie, the proprietor, showed us how to sand, distress and wash the wood to make it look like old barn wood.

Bailie, at the Prescott Board & Brush was fantastic. I would go back and do another one, just to solicit her business. She was kind, patient, and informative. She gave us all the tools and knowledge to allow us to make decisions that resulted in the perfect end result.

We pre-choose our saying online, and the stencils were ready and waiting for us to embark on our project.

Then we picked our background and lettering colors and after preparing the boards, we were on our way to creating our individual projects.

It was great fun and we got to take home a terrific project that is our own. Of course, in true Ritter style, we had to further customize it, so I wood burned our logo onto a plate to make my saying truly our own.

I strongly recommend the outing to Prescott Board & Brush. It was a great respite and super fun afternoon.

Advertisement

Nelson, Nevada

We were ready for a diversion, so we headed out of town to a place on our ‘want to go’ list. We had been told that we could go to Nelson, Nevada at the end of the road, with a great view overlooking the Colorado River and see big horn sheep coming down for water.

We didn’t see any big horn sheep, but we saw lots of iconic old cars and old buildings, relics of a time gone by.

Instead we found this cute little, eclectic ghost town between Searchlight and Boulder City, NV. Back in its heyday, in the late 1800’s Nelson and the El Dorado Mining Camp was the largest city in NV (prior to Las Vegas casino’s). Gold mining was active in the mines here from 1858 through 1945.

We were thrilled to be able to take a mine tour and actually go inside the mine.

The El Dorado Mine has been featured in several notable movies, probably most popular Kurt Russell & Kevin Costner’s 2001 movie, ‘3000 Miles to Graceland’.

These days it’s main attraction is tourists who come by the hoards to wander through the scattered relics, and tour the mine for $15 per head.

We enjoyed our visit and the opportunity for a change in scenario that beckoned a different time.