impromptu fall flowers

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)…

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makedo plastic connectors (for improvised halloween costumes and ..)

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:

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what if sherlock holmes were alive today?

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…

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why not?: d-i-y treadmill desk

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…

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one thing ALWAYS leads to another: from ‘revolutionary yardscape’ to the campana bros astonishing website

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…

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patti smith’s (+ ancient chinese) smile therapy

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…

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graphing novels, business plans and other big ideas

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…

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ceiling task light redux: the mother of all task lights

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 for about $20 each and rig one. (Even if you had an iron-worker make the…

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dieter roth’s workspace + the courage to ‘leave crap the way it is’

We originally planned to post this image of artist Dieter Roth’s studio with little comment just because we find it illuminating to see how creative people work, what their spaces look like. Then we stumbled on the story behind this image clipped from the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago, in a…

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benoit mandelbrot on life as a very crooked line

The internet is awash in gorgeous videos like this one honoring – and illustrating – mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s mind-expanding research into fractals, rough geometric shapes, whose pattern splits into reduced copies of the whole, over and over.  (That is our fumbling attempt at a description and doesn’t begin to tell you why they are important).…

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