Alert !!: ‘the improvised life is THRILLED to be part a very cool group post called NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays, the ultimate holiday guide by New York’s best bloggers, from unique gifts to the most celebratory libations, to Christmas with Andy Warhol. Be sure to check out it; it’s on the Home Page now, and here, or just scroll down to the bottom of this post.
We steered clear of email cards because we couldn’t find any that delivered the visual message we wanted AND because they lacked an envelope, which we think an essential part of the pleasure of receiving a card.
Until recently. We discovered Paperless Post, a website that allows you to design your own cards (to a degree) and then send them in a sort of digital envelope that the recipient gets to open online. Once you create an account, your first few cards are free; after that, the charge is a fraction of what snailmail costs. It’s the envelope that got us. read more…
We LOVE this simple bed on a base of this rough-cut timbers, one longer than the other to extend beyond the bed to make a built-in side table. This bedroom is part of an exhibition at The Villa Noailles, an arts center located in the hills above Hyères, in the Var, in southeastern France. The villa is an early modernist house, built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for art patrons in 1925. (It has quite a history.)
Four designers were invited to design a guest room in a wing of the building, conceiving the basic furniture of a room: a bed, a table-office, bedding, a lamp and a vase.
In this bathroom, the walls were covered with artful photomurals, that expand the space (imagining it with plain walls shows the scope of the transformation, do-able in any untiled bathroom.) read more…
Want a place to read Design/Interiors/Home/D-I-Y blogs all in one place? Check out Remodelista’s Design Newsstand, which brings their great, curated selection of blogs together, organized by general categories, like Fabulous Femmes, Hipster & Minimalist, Exotica, Design Magazines Online…
Like a great newsstand, it invites browsing (it’s in beta, and is a bit wonky on Safari still)…
We’re pleased to be included in Renovators & DIYers, though we were thinking the category a little limited and concrete for what we do. Maybe not though…we ARE about renovating, inside (our heads) and out…
We have a bad habit of scribbling notes on on 2-inch Post-Its, only to find ourselves in a sea of them: bits and pieces of information everywhere. The classic sizes of stickies that 3M offers don’t entirely work for us; we need repositionable notes that accommodate writing out a series of ideas. We love these oblong adhesive notes from the Poketo shop: big Desk-It notes can sit under your wrists as you type at your keyboard or you can stick them on the monitor.
So of course we’re thinking: rather than pay $8+ for a pad of sixty 11.8- x-2.7-inch-sheets, why not just cut ordinary 8 1/2 x 11-inch sheets of paper into 2 3/4-inch rectangles (or whatever size we like)? read more…
When we stumbled on this two-part video of the Macedonia Youth Sanctuary Choir in Winston-Salem, North Carolina singing “Everyday is a Day of Thanksgiving”, we were knocked out by how the choir just LEAPED into that song, singing Leonard Burks’ wondrous hymn full out. That, in itself seemed amazing until, near the end of the Part One (2:15) an ample woman named Takela in a striped blouse starts improvising…
….and the whole thing rocks and rises up in part 2:
“I’m thankful that the morning sky is skidding across the small, square metal plate embedded in the sidewalk in a way that makes it look silvery and wise.”
Just in case you’re scrambling for last minute recipes, here are a few favorites from past posts that work perfectly in the Thanksgiving palette. We’ve also included our recipe for quick, practically foolproof, freeform tarts made with fall fruit such as apples, pears or plums (plays on Tart-O-Matic: Improvising Fresh Fruit Tarts that we posted last summer). read more…
This unusual cranberry conserve is immensely satisfying, tart and sweet, with a chunky texture from an abundance of nuts and raisins. It’s adapted from a recipe by Mrs. Fannie Wought of Cullom, Illinois that was published many years ago in the wonderful, out-of-print-but-findable Mennonite Community Cookbook by Mary Emma Showalter. The conserve is delicious with roast turkey, chicken and pork, even cheddar cheese. I like it best on its own, eaten with a spoon as a midnight snack. Around the holidays, I make big batches of this conserve and pack it into jars to give as gifts. (It will keep for up to a month in a covered container in the refrigerator.)
We love this swell makeshift seat from Ikea’s Christmas blog (in Swedish): a stack of oversized books with a pillow on top. It’s comes close in simple brilliance to our favorite from last year: the chair bench, made from a few chairs and a long board… read more…
Last year, we were invited to the collective Thanksgiving dinner of several families. One person oversaw the wines, turkey and stuffing; others made desserts and side dishes. Another improvised the huge 16-foot-long table that would seat 18 hungry grown-ups and children. It was not until we were helping deconstruct the table at the end of the evening that we realized it was made of two 4-x-8-foot sheets of plywood placed end to end on our host’s dining table.
Plywood is a fine, inexpensive material for making tabletops in a variety of shapes, from rectangles, to squares to rounds. Since the table will be covered with a cloth, it doesn’t really matter what the plywood looks like – whether veneered or not. Thickness should depend on the supports underneath; it shouldn’t bow. (If you are a person who likes to have plywood on-hand for projects, then it makes sense to buy what you will re-use).
Last year’s table-maker happened to have a huge Frette linen tablecloth (from a past life) just large enough to cover. At party last summer, he cut open a new duvet cover to make a huge tablecloth that went to the floor. We’re fine with “piecing” tablecloths – that is, overlapping whatever we have one hand to make a patchwork. But many fabrics will do, from sheets to bolts of linen and cotton on line, to muslin doubled up.
And of course, plates, silverware, napkins and glasses will invariably be cobbled together from different sets to make the right number, with great charm and warmth.
Years ago a friend devised an interesting table top to use for big dinner parties. She had two half-circles cut from two 4′x 8′ sheets of plywood. Then she hinged them together at the straight sides with a piano hinge. It opened up like a book to become an round 8-foot-diameter table top which she placed, hinge-side-down, on her smaller round table (the base). She covered the rig with a pale yellow linen cloth and set it with her best china and silver. Her guests never knew what lay beneath the beautiful setting. To store the top, she folded it in half and slid it under the sofa where it stayed, out of sight, until the next party.
Our rough map of how to make it is below. You can make any size top you wish using this method. We recommend the biggest size that you can a) balance safely on whatever base(s) you have, and b) are able to store easily (figure the length, width and height when folded). Or use the essential idea to make a hinged rectangle that would fold to hide under a bed or behind a door, similar to the one we wrote about a few weeks ago. Folding sawhorses make a good base (we keep a pair in the closet). Check out our d-i-y on making a huge rectangular table out of plywood.
Mary Oliver‘s poem “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness” appeared in the New York Times last Sunday, while we were visiting a friend who had recently made the decision to forego treatment of a deadly cancer, and live out her life, eyes wide open.
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
Our friend’s sense of things echoes the poem’s; they could have been her words…
“…the world descends into a rich mash, in order that it may resume…the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be…let us go on…”
Cerre of 2 or 3 Things We Know posted this video by her film maker/correspondent father. He is making a series of short films (with an accompanying blog to come) about aging baby boomers who have reinvented their careers and personal lives. It’s inspiring no matter what age you are.
We LOVE the shift that we see happening all around us: people hitting their 50′s and 60′s and re-imagining the decades to come in very different ways than the traditional concepts of retirement aging…
In Lookbook 54, artists Emily Larned and Roxane Zargham created 54 different improvisations on one XL white t-shirt, using common household supplies (binder clips, safety pins, duct tape) as styling aids. They set serious constraints for themselves: The shirt is never cut or permanently altered, and all the accessories serve a function.
In their singular work, they seek to answer the question:
“What is the most reductive form that can yield the most variety in meaning? Possibly the white t-shirt. Tight it is James Dean, huge it is hip hop. It’s not what you wear, it’s how you wear it.”
They expand the view of what’s possible in the realm of ordinary t-shirt. read more…
by Mary Emma Showalter. The conserve is delicious with roast turkey, chicken and pork, even cheddar cheese. I like it best on its own, eaten with a spoon as a midnight snack. Around the holidays, I make big batches of this conserve and pack it into jars to give as gifts. (It will keep for up to a month in a covered container in the refrigerator.)
