Maria Robledo
The last “turning” hydrangeas from Maria Robledo‘s garden made the perfect instant flower arrangement for the table…
…here’s another of Maria’s arrangements made with branches of leaves and some yellow flower that looks like an undersea creature…(dig the fabulous nude by Sofia Rower in the background)… read more…
Life Edited is a movement to reduce our environmental impact by simplifying our lives at home. In this short video, Treehugger founder Graham Hill sums up its challenge to rethink how you live, to reduce your footprint, to live better and save money and resources. He asks
“What if I lived in a couple of hundred square feet less? This is an equation I really wanted to explore, so I started a site, LifeEdited.org“.
The site is a place for him to try out the ideas he’s been thinking about for years… and for you to submit yours (for various prizes)… “Ruthless editing of your stuff, transforming furniture, space-saving housewares, digitizing your life and sharing systems.”
Life Edited’s mandate: “Less but better…”
Right up our alley! We’re going to keep an idea on this one.
via Core 77
We’re knocked out by these Katchina costumes made in 1922 by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Swiss artist, and wife of artist Jean Arp, with whom she collaborated during their long marriage…
via the great, illuminating blog Rolu
Maria Robledo
“I keep drinking malted milk, trying to drive my blues away…”
–Robert Johnson, Delta Blues Guitar Legend,1937
Although malted milk powder has been a staple in my pantry for many years, I didn’t actually know what it was until recently. I was making a batch of chocolate malted pudding and suddenly wondered what this homely, delicious stuff was that I had taken for granted for so long. I stopped midway and Googled it.
While I listened to Robert Johnson sing “Malted Milk” on YouTube (click here to listen while you read), I learned that malt powder was developed by William and James Horlick in Racine Wisconsin in 1873. It’s made from dried milk, wheat flour and malted barley – barley seeds that are that are soaked, sprouted, dried and ground, a process that converts their starch into uniquely flavored “malty” sugars. Originally promoted as a drink for invalids and children, malt powder began to appeal to other tastes and needs. Admiral Richard E. Byrd took it on an Antarctic expedition and eventually, it became a popular drink at soda fountains. After the Horlick brothers had the brilliant idea of combining malt powder with chocolate, it became an iconic American flavor, in chocolate-malted shakes and malted-milk balls. (Check out our Alt-Malted Milk Ball recipe.)
Years ago, when I started monkeying around with classic chocolate pudding, adding malted milk powder seemed like a perfect embellishment. read more…
Makedo is a set of simple plastic connectors for creating things from the stuff around you, like cardboard, plastic and fabric. This little video gives the inspiring gist, as does Makedo’s image galleries in many categories: creatures, structures (our favorite…there’s even a boat), domestic bliss, vehicles. And for Halloween, check out these cool costumes: read more…
We were riveted by the first episode of the BBC’s clever adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, set in 2010. Sherlock is as brilliant, eccentric and surprising as he should be, with lots of thrilling outside-the-box thinking. PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery will be airing three 90-minute episodes of Sherlock. (Check the site for airing times in your area.)
With thanks to Kottke for reminding us.
Sally Schneider
Blogging is hard on us – not psychically – we love researching and discovery and sharing – but physically: our backs suffer from hours of sitting and we’re getting a little plump (many days, we’re hard-pressed to tear ourselves away to work out; before we know it, the day is GONE). Plus, we’ve been reading about how bad sitting for long periods is. Yeah, we know about getting up to stretch every hour, and doing tai chi, and …all the helpful things that we’re trying to get disciplined enough to do…
What we really wish is that there was a way to work while we work out: actually write and edit photos for our posts, not just read or listen to music. We decided to try out our fantasy of rigging a treadmill with a laptop, to make a treadmill desk. The idea is you walk slowly as you work, and over time, you cover a lot of ground, burn calories and moving your body really helps it. Why not? we thought.
We took a plywood board to the gym, placed it across the rails of a treadmill and set our laptop on it. Then we started walking, really slowly at first, while we got acclimated enough to actually open a document and write. It was pretty relaxing, felt good to be moving and standing rather than sitting…though not something we the management of our gym would let us do on a regular basis. But IF you had your own treadmill in your space, it would be a viable alternative…
We’ve discovered that other people have had the same idea. read more…
Sometimes we are just completely knocked out by the connections of ideas and people we make daily writing ‘the improvised life’. Like Matthew Levesque, a reader from San Francisco who runs Building Resources, a not-for-profit depot of re-usable and re-manufactured materials for building and landscaping….
…who wrote a book we want called: The Revolutionary Yardscape: Ideas for Repurposing Local Materials to Create Containers, Pathways, Lighting, and More
….whose comment on our post about “The Mother of All Task Lights” called our attention to…
a) a wonderful Achille Castiglione lamp that is hidden in the photo
b) and the EXTRAORDINARY website and work of the Campana Brothers, the Brazilian design team. Their website needs Flash to run and will try your computer’s resources. And once you enter, it will eat at least a half hour of your time, a fabulous example of what’s possible in a website. Somehow, in the oddest ways possible, the Campanas give you a sense of the process/origins of their furniture and housewares. On the main page, click Projects, and then click on the project you want to see. Prepared to be surprised…
Our favorites: read more…
Last week’s Remodelista post about the shipping pallet shelving Olabisi Winery’s devised for their tasting room opened our eyes to an essential quality of shipping pallets we had overlooked: stacked, they make instant flat storage. Pallets are only about 5 inches high, with a natural space for bottles (wine, soda, olive oil – anything) or flat items like papers and artwork. All you have to do is stack the pallets. At Olabisi, they use jelly roll pans as drawers. (You could apply this idea to the desks we showed a few weeks back.) At Uline, you can find pallets in different dimensions from 24 x 24 on up. We envision painting new pallets for a more graphic look, say, really dark gray…
Related posts: The Scoop on Safe Shipping Pallets (Shipping Pallets 101)
PS: Some Possible Dangers of Wood Shipping Pallets
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We had just finished writing the post on Laughter Yoga when we remembered an interview punk rocker Patti Smith gave to The New York Times Magazine. She outlined her personal “smile therapy,” evolved to ease the pain of a rough life.
“Do you ever feel lonely?” the interviewer asked.
“Sometimes the pain still — the loss of my brother, the loss of Robert [Mapplethorpe, a close friend and mentor], the loss of my husband, even the loss of my children being children — we can access a lot of things that cause pain. This might seem really funny, but when I feel like that, I make myself smile,” she answered.
“How do you do that?”
“I just sit and physically make myself smile. Because sometimes it makes you laugh, and then you go, ‘All right.’”
We mentioned laugh-and-smile therapy to our editor-at-large, David Saltman, who also happens to be a teacher and long-time practitioner of Tai Chi and Qi Gong.
“In fact”, he said, “there are many practices in Tai Chi and Qi Gong that involve an ‘inner smile’. My teacher used to say, ‘When you get up in the morning, clean your heart with laughter.’”
We had no idea we could laugh at will until we read The Laughing Guru in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Madan Kataria promotes Laughter Yoga, which he says can be a cure for all sorts of physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. We have a few of those, so we thought we’d try it. We wondered if laughing at will would just add up to a kind of false, phony-baloney laughter to dupe ourselves into thinking that things are fine when they’re not.
We found we COULD just laugh, and once we started, it was easy to keep going. Then we tried laughing with a friend on the phone (he had read the article and had been privately trying it out). We found ourselves laughing so hard we were holding our bellies. Forced laughing, when done with other people, soon becomes real laughing, like some wild and beneficial virus. We discovered that laughing has a strange effect, a REAL effect totally different than we were imagining. It seems to short-circuit anxiety and shift the view immediately. Try it for yourself!
Says Kataria: “Laughter is a choice. A connector of people. No barriers. No language.”
In this YouTube video, 250 people came together at dawn in Mumbai, to LAUGH like crazy. read more…
Ever since we blogged a whiteboard-painted wall for tracking ideas and next steps, we’ve been coming across examples of graphed ideas. This is J.K. Rowlings plot spreadsheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It knocked us out for how utterly straightforward and unfussy it is; written in ball-point pen on lined notebook paper. And look what it became!
It reminded us how useful/essential it is to graph our ideas, and make visual representations of getting from one place to another – where we are to where we want to go – and the steps in-between, with room to shift it as things evolve and change.
The form is whatever works for you. We find that our paper maps get buried. With so many things going on, they really need to be on a wall for us to keep our goals in mind. We’re going to build that into our new office.
Design consultants IDEO famously use Post-It notes to track ideas in their brainstorming sessions. The notes can be moved around as the idea evolves. read more…
David Douglas Duncan Archive,The Harry Ransom Center, U of Texas at Austin
Sometimes, we have so much to do, so many things pulling at us, that we don’t know what to do first. We’ve been trying out a new very simple guideline that we read recently; It’s a quote from Pablo Picasso:
“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”
We find that it immediately cuts the shit, and helps to clarify the important things, even if it doesn’t perfectly resolve all the rest…
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We also found a trove of David Douglas Duncan’s wonderful photographs of Picasso, online with notations, like this one: read more…
When we wrote about suspending task lights from the ceiling, we never imagined THIS possibility: the spider-like mother-of-all-task-lights designed by Ron Giliad for Moooi. It’s available at Modern Light for about $4,000, OR you could buy sixteen adjustable task lights
Related post: Task Lights Suspended from the Ceiling
Otto Zitko
We found this image of artist Otto Zitko’s work “destiny of the line” on You Have Been Here Sometime. What a swell playroom it would make.
