This time last year, Emily and Casey Lewis felt lucky to have any artwork to sell at Festival for the Eno, where the couple will be again this weekend. The work space of their business, Beechwood Metalworks, which was in a barn behind their Burlington home, had burned to the ground a week earlier.

"Casey was in the shop and I was outside with the children," Emily Lewis recalled. "Casey didn't have time to get anything out of there. It took six firetrucks to put the fire out. We didn't even have a hammer left." They think the fire started in a machine that contained liquid oxygen, which then further fueled the blaze.

Luckily, the flock of butterfly garden stakes they'd finished for the Eno show had survived. "Casey had just taken all the butterflies outside for me to paint," she said.

One year later, Beechwood Metalworks is in a new, larger building with three full-time employees and a calendar filled with metal sculpture projects.

"That fire is the best thing that could have happened to us," Lewis said.

Creative family: Emily, 30, grew up as Emily Lind in Hillsborough and credits her family with sparking her creativity. Her mother, Lisa Flinn, writes children's books, draws and paints, and her stepfather, Bill Flinn, is a metal worker. "My father doesn't have a job in art, but he likes to makes things with his hands," she said.

Lewis, however, wanted to be a large-animal veterinarian. After struggling with math and biology at UNC-Greensboro, she discovered she had learning disabilities. "I had wonderful teachers and counselors and they all asked me, 'What are you good at? What do you like to do?' I told them, 'what I really like to do is art.' So I went into the art department and loved it."

Metal magic: The one medium Lewis initially avoided was metal. "Growing up with a metal shop in the backyard, it was a chore. Like I'd have to prime and paint hundreds of feet of handrails, or help clean up." But it was something she was familiar with, so she decided to learn the technical end. "It was really fun, and I loved the program. I got my own perspective and experience." She met her future husband, Casey, in a clay course. "It was like kindergarten. We were sitting across from each other playing with clay."

All shapes: Burlington native Casey Lewis, 33, started out wood carving and then added metal. "He's able to see shapes in wood and metal that most people don't," Emily Lewis said. "He wants to find hardest thing to do and figure it out, whatever it is." The couple, married since 2000, have two daughters, ages 3 and 4.

First jobs: After they graduated from college, in the late 1990s, Emily Lewis worked at Stone Line Designs in Hillsborough, a high-end office furniture company, as its first metal worker. "It was a great place to work," she said. "Everyone was such an amazing craftsperson." She then went to work with her stepfather until 2002, when she and Casey decided to open shop.

He meanwhile, had gotten a job at a sawmill and a fabrication shop. "He liked it because he wanted to know all about the equipment and machinery, which we didn't really learn in college. He got a lot of experience with these large, large pieces of equipment."

Moonlighting at home: "We started our business in 2002 while we still had other jobs," Lewis said. They bought a computerized plasma cutter, "like a giant Etch a Sketch," she said. "We'd work until midnight in the barn behind our house." They started to make butterfly garden stakes and copper sun wall art to sell at local shows. When they were expecting their first child, Casey's job at the sawmill ended.

"We decided that was a sign, that it was time to go into business full time," she said. "We're very spiritual and we definitely think that God has set clear paths in our lives." They immediately had work, mostly industrial. "We were small and didn't have the overhead, so could charge less."

Mostly art: While Beechwood Metals started with 80 percent industrial work, it's now flipped to 80 percent artistic work. That started with the 2006 show of Alamance County Arts Council's biannual Willow Walk.

"We were getting ready for the show and trying to think of bigger sculptures. With two girls, Casey was thinking 'Alice in Wonderland' kinds of things. So we made eight-foot-tall flowers, a Gerber daisy, daffodil, tulip and daylily. People loved them, and the arts council bought all four of them for the city of Burlington." They're now installed around the carousel and rides at Burlington City Park.

Secret garden: The flowers led to what Lewis calls "our first big break," an opportunity to make a 28-piece rooftop wind garden for the UNC Children's Hospital, called the Charli Ramsey Moving Memory Garden. "We made bumblebees that fly around in circles, flowers that spin, a grasshopper that goes around on a blade of grass." While the garden cannot be seen from public spaces, the couple has been asked to bid on another UNC hospital job that would be visible.

Helping hands: Last summer's fire put some of their work on hold for several months, but "all our customers were great," Lewis said. Their church, Trinity Worship Center in Burlington, helped them clean up the fire site and raised grocery money for the family. The Lewises also have a family friend who has helped them out over the years. "He got us into the building we're in now," she said of the 5,000-square-foot building they moved into in October, which they're already adding on to. "Now we have a waterjet machine that cuts everything with water, not only metal but marble and stone and glass."

More art: On the horizon is more artistic and interactive work, Lewis said. "Casey is getting a little itchy. He wants to do more abstract pieces and have more chances to be the artist. We're also playing with solar power and wind movement. We're working on a Gerber daisy with a solar-powered bee that goes around it." They're also building another wind garden for a hospital in Tulsa. "Our conference room is filled with metal grass, another room has 10 or so giant mushrooms, and we have giant bees in hallways."

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