Sushiesque on Flickr (Creative Commons License)
October 2009
halloween inspiration: cardboard box as the empire state building
Designer Pamela Hovland sent this image of her son Henry’s costume, a family collaboration. It’s amazing what recycled cardboard boxes and some paint can become…
Thanks Pamela!
recipe: roasted pears for sweet or savory improvisations
Maria Robledo
Throughout fall and winter, one of my favorite improvisational “base” preparations is Roasted Pears. These are pears that are roasted with a bit of sugar, lemon juice, butter and a split vanilla bean or even herbs, until they become tender and caramelized, with a concentrated pear flavor. Roasted Pears are one of those miraculous recipes that are easy to make and have endless applications, both sweet and savory, a jumping-off-point from which to improvise, with delicious and often surprising results. read more…
tool for improvising: embrace mistakes
Today, I found a comment at the end of my post about deferring judgment. It read:
“Is it too judgmental to note that in the U.S. “judgment” is the preferred spelling?”
OMG!!! The sign I had spent forever trying to make was spelled wrong (“judgment” is spelled correctly elsewhere in the post). It is NOT too judgmental to alert me to errors, as I rely on several friends to do; I am typ0-prone. But, there is a story behind the mistake, and as with many mistakes, some redemption. read more…
tool for improvising: defer judgment
When software engineer Gever Tulley left his job at Adobe to start his Tinkering School for Kids, he posted a letter on his blog, ‘some things right ‘, to the people he had worked with. In it, he left them with some “good ideas” like Play! and Instead of Having a Career Path, Always Do the Most Interesting Thing You Can Do!
The real knock-out is ” Number 2: “Defer Judgment” from a sign he saw on the wall of IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy that has innovated novel ways of collaborative problem solving. read more…
d-i-y egg cups + recipe for perfect soft-boiled eggs
Ellen Silverman
Hardware stores and art supply stores are great places to inspire your improvisational leanings, using a variation of the children’s game “inventing”: think of uses for things you may not be familiar with.
The other day, as I was browsing through bins of bolts, screws, hunks of pipe and gaskets in my local hardware store, I suddenly flashed on “egg cups!” as I played with a rather moderne-looking 2-inch length of threaded brass pipe. The idea of improvising an egg cup using found stuff became a lens through which I scanned the store. It turns out that egg cups are everywhere, just waiting to be discovered by lovers of perfect soft-boiled eggs (see recipe below). read more…
new york city’s taxi farmers
David Saltman
As today’s guest blogger, David Saltman tells of his discovery of some inadvertent guerilla gardeners. He did some on-the-spot investigative reporting for ‘the improvised life’ and photographed the story with his i-Phone. Thanks, David!
“I was walking down the street in New York City recently when I ran smack into a cornfield. It was no hallucination — big, fat cornstalks were growing out of a tiny sliver of ground at the foot of a stone hillside in the northwest corner of the city. I walked further and saw another abundant patch of corn, then plantings of beans, herbs and a grape arbor, all butting up against the granite bluff on top of which sits my 25-story apartment building. read more…
the rich rewards of an unplanned day
Laura Salierno
Today was a day of wondrous tiny occurrences, the kind that happens when we are relaxed and open and looking around at the world, rather than rushing to get somewhere or get something done.
The leaves literally turned color while we slept: a blaze of oranges and reds shimmered against the clear blue sky. Walking down to catch the train, David and I noticed a patch of tall corn, some herbs and squash planted alongside the tracks: a touch of the farm in the middle of the city… read more…
trompe l’oeil room (cocoon) bed: opinions wanted
I continue to mull ways to merge office and bedroom without sleeping in the midst of the fray of papers and projects…and stumbled on an interesting variant of the idea posted earlier, of creating a little shed in the office/bedroom that would be a sleeping cocoon, protected from officey stuff and the idea of never-finished work. This version of a “room (cocoon) bed” from Hotel Aire de Bardenas in Spain has a wonderful view (a nature preserve). Not so in my city digs.
To create a view, I’m fooling around with the idea of making a “room (cocoon) bed” whose fabric walls are printed with a trompe l’oeil photo mural, read more…
everyday objects con’t: junya watanabe’s zipper and snap improvs
After reading yesterday’s post ‘the safety pin (and other everyday object) improvisations’, Lydia Wills sent me photos from fashion designer Junya Watanabe’s 2005 collection, where he used zippers and snaps in the most beautiful way: layers of gold zippers become something totally other. Look closely and you’ll see that, aside from the gold plating, these are essentially standard-issue 8-or-so-inch zippers with their fabric siding in a gorgeous color – lots of them – stitched snugly side-by-side and overlapping. One of the most dazzling permutations of this playing-about with zippers is this sensational collar… read more…
the safety pin (and other everyday objects) as improvisation
Initech Guy/Flickr
Every great invention, from the Murphy bed to the bicycle, started as an improvisation: an elegant solution to something someone needed or just plain wanted. But an improvisation never stops there. The improvised invention gets improvised upon, and that improvisation gets improvised upon, and so on, and so on. Viewing the everyday objects around us as improvisations makes for endless inspiration.
Take the safety pin, the ultimate emergency tool that holds up hems without thread and makes possible all manner of instant repairs. read more…
“a zeitgeist-perfect website” !!!
Not yet four months old, ‘the improvised life’ got its first public mention today, in Manhattan User’s Guide, a daily, often surprising, newsletter and website that is THE word on what’s happening in New York and beyond. Here’s what it said:
“NYC journalist, chef, and author Sally Schneider has launched, with several cohorts, a new, zeitgeist-perfect website that we love called The Improvised Life. From its immediately engaging design to its thoroughly appealing idea of ‘improvising as a daily practice’, a way of taking each day with a flexible, open-mind, we can’t get enough of the discoveries, observations, and tips therein, covering food, design, DIY, and more.”
…we are thrilled and proud and happy….
Thanks a million, MUG!
d-i-y? lace chain-link fence
Kerry Polite/The Design Center at Philadelphia University
The Dutch design firm Demakersvan created this lace chain-link fence in response to a challenge by the Design Center at Philadelphia University: to create a site-specific work inspired by a collection of historic Quaker lace, for an exhibition called Lace in Translation. Demakersvan totally transformed ugly industrial fencing by applying what looks to me to be tatting, the age-old technique of making intricate patterns of lace by hand, using a single thread. It’s such a simple and great idea to temper the almost universal ugliness and reproach (KEEP OUT!!) of chainlink, it’s a wonder no one thought of it before. Demakersvan sums it up: “Like brambles fences are rising rampantly around us. What would happen if a patch of embroidered wire would meet with and continue as an industrial fence. Hostility versus kindness, industrial versus craft.
Demakersvan asked the simple question “What would happen if…? to find their brilliant idea. read more…
sink as work surface, designed by a cook
When Margot Wellington designed the kitchen of her house in East Hampton in 1984, she defied the usual notions of kitchen design. Instead, she set out to incorporate the elements she found essential from many years of serious cooking and entertaining. One of her most remarkable innovations was the design of an eleven-foot-long stainless steel counter with a large shallow sink built seamlessly into the center of it. The sink itself becomes a work surface, allowing her to use the whole eleven-foot span to do many jobs at once, from prepping vegetables on the left to preparing a turkey for roasting on the right. She designed the sink herself and then found someone to make it for her.
Here she describes the logic behind her design, and how she made her idea a reality:
a (mind) game for cultivating resourcefulness
Sally Schneider
Helvetia is a tiny town in the West Virginia Appalachians where I‘ve learned a great deal about improvising over the nearly forty years I’ve been visiting there. Settled by Swiss-German immigrants in 1869 who started from scratch in its wilderness valley, a strong tradition of resourcefulness courses through the town. “If you don’t got it, you don’t need it” is a common saying, a way of everyday survival for folks who are a forty-five minute drive on winding mountain roads from the nearest store. If you don’t got it, you figure something else out…like baking a souffle in an iron skillet (no souffle dish), or using a door knob as a pestle, or a wine bottle to roll out dough…I once saw a man use a pitchfork to stir a huge cauldron full of boiling ramps (wild leeks) set over an open fire…
When my friend Eleanor Mailloux, who grew up in Helvetia, got around to looking at my blog, she wrote that it reminded her of a game she played as a kid. That old Appalachian game was a simple way to cultivate an improvisational mindset, and still is: read more…
