July 2009
Maria Robledo
When her spirits were flagging, or she just needed a little vacation from everyday life, my mother would take me to a Greek restaurant near the theatre district in New York City. We would always order a rustic dish that is a classic in Greek cuisine: cold sliced beets with a garlic sauce known as Skordalia. It is an extraordinarily satisfying and somehow heartening dish. The beets, which taste at once sweet and fruity and slightly of earth, are a perfect foil for the mellow garlic sauce: a creamy base of mashed potatoes beaten with lots of olive oil and vigorously flavored with fresh garlic (an earthier version of egg-yolk based garlic sauces beloved in all Mediterranean countries). It was an early, enduring lesson about the ability of food to transform my view of things, and make me feel like a million bucks. read more…
07.31.09 |
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in family + friends, food, recipes |
I was passing by the Kate Spade store on Fifth Avenue on my way to the farmer’s market the other day, and found myself walking on beautiful colored stripes painted on the sidewalk; they seemed to stream out of the store’s stripey interior – a great, simple idea. Why not paint a sidewalk, or any cement, flagstone or brick floor or patio? (Imagine New York City with its sidewalks in colors…) read more…
07.30.09 |
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in copy this!, how-to, sightings |
I’ve come across a number of posts about furniture made of pallets, those flat rectangles of rough hammered-together wood platforms commonly used to move bundled goods around by a fork lift. This lounge chair by Studiomama is a particularly good one; it has clean lines and looks like it would be comfortable – perfect at a beach house or on a patio. It is made out of two pallets and 50 screws, from an inexpensive, down-loadable plan. It would be great painted, or naturally weathered.
The ever-innovative Studiomama has other well-designed examples of pallet furniture read more…
07.29.09 |
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in furniture, garden, hard, how-to, materials, plans, repurpose |
Stephen Falcke via The Style Files
Over the past few months, I’ve found myself clipping pictures of walls decorated with groupings of simple, often primitive round or oval objects that make for a clean, unexpectedly modern design. Repetitions of baskets, plates, wooden bowls become a great deal more than the sum of their parts: abstract patterns made of “storied” elements. read more…
07.27.09 |
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in elements, materials, walls + windows |
Designer Abby Clawson, creator of interesting Hi & Low blog, devised a series of playful, big-relief-from-the-usual- fax cover sheets. She made them in response to an exhibit called “FAX” that she saw at the Drawing Center in New York City; artists, designers, thinkers, film makers were asked to conceive of the fax machine as a drawing tool (unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be viewable online). It looks like they could be done by with pretty ordinary tools: read more…
07.26.09 |
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in copy this!, inspiration blogs + sites, media, reimagine |
Maria Robledo
One of the best things about encouraging people to improvise in the kitchen is to hear how they monkeyed with one of my recipes.“Wow”, I think, “I never thought of that!” Like my friend Ellen using an herb sea salt, fragrant with dried rosemary, thyme and lavender, instead of kosher salt in a chocolate cake recipe she’d found in one of my books. Ellen said she was about to add the salt to the batter when she saw the package of herb salt on the counter. She ground the coarse gray sea salt with dried herbs in a mortar and threw in a tad more than the recipe called for (to account for the herbs). The cake was a big hit and now has become HER chocolate cake recipe, with roots going back decades. read more…
07.23.09 |
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in family + friends, food, recipes |
Platform21 calls themselves a design platform (“curiously exploring”, “strangely optimistic”) but other people call them change agents, and that definitely describes them. Witness their latest project, Repair Manifesto. In eloquent, energizing statements, it expounds the coolness of repair. (Check out #5 and #7.) It has hit a nerve, racing through the internet like wildfire. read more…
07.22.09 |
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in how-to, inspiration blogs + sites, principles, rules for living, solutions, strategies |
Phil Mansfield for the N.Y. Times
The N.Y.Times recently ran a story about a couple who bought a house in Upstate New York for $95,000 and fixed it up, beautifully, for $10,000, using pure elbow grease and a eye for scavenged and second-hand stuff.
The best nugget of info, to me, was about how to score serious finds on Craigslist: “Using Craigslist successfully means scrolling through the listings every day, not once a month,” read more…
07.21.09 |
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in buildings, cool spaces, free + flea, reimagine, solutions |
I was just imagining how my friend Matthew, who is a gifted paper artist, might design a light out of a paper shade and hanging bulb were he given the challenge, when I came across some free, origami-like down-loadable plans on the internet. They are the “gift” of Arash and Kelly, an industrial design studio with a mission “to help to re-connect our global culture”. A video of their Octopus light being made gives a sense that this is really something an anyone might improvise upon.
But even more inspiring and full-of-info is a video of a light for which they don’t give exact plans, but do show the assembly of: plastic leaves with perforations along the edges that “zip” together to make a number of configurations. It made me think: “There’s a great approach to d-i-y lights and shades”: read more…
07.20.09 |
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in hard, how-to, materials, plans, resources, stores, tools |
I saw a photograph of one of Jim Denevan’s sand drawings and my head changed: every notion about sand and beach and drawing and playing shifted and opened up. I’d never thought about drawing in sand this way. Then I read the story behind his paintings, which I stumbled on on the artist’s website, and realized that this amazing process required no special tools, but a mighty amount of vision and patience, and the where-with-all to do it. Here’s what it said: read more…
07.19.09 |
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in art, inspiration, inspiration blogs + sites, nature, outside, projects + play |
