Knowing that Lydia Wills was about to move to a bigger apartment, we enlisted Ellen Silverman to photograph her 600-square-foot studio near Gramercy Park. We’ve known Lydia for years and have watched her apartment evolve into a home with lots of good ideas, far too many to cover in one post. So we thought we’d do…
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What is it that we love about this? This wrap job is a whole OTHER thing than a mover would do. The use of twine and rope, akimbo, along with the fine lines of the unseen table (which could be made out of anything), turned it into a sculpture. We’re filing that in our heads…
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Improvisation requires focus and time, two commodities few of us possess. And when you’re waist deep in alligators, it is hard to remember you came to drain the swamp. How can we get focus and time? Many people we know have read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. The title appeals to our…
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Pamela Hovland alerted us to a wonderful essay posted on Design Observer recently, called The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship; it is about how “everywhere you look in India you will find evidence of the maker’s hand.” A sign painter, faced with a drain opening smack in the middle of his underwear ad, transformed it…
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At a dinner party at wine writer Anthony Giglio’s house one evening, we saw him scribble the name of each guest on their wine glass with a white marker: a chic way of helping guests keep tab of their glass in a crowd (and avoiding unnecessary pours – and washing – of fresh glasses). There’s…
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kimono + 7 belts + 7 beaded necklaces + red shoes + heart shades + Mickey cap ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! With thanks to Tara Mann (who this is/was in 1995)
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When we were looking around for affordable knobs for a kitchen cabinet we wanted to use as furniture, we spent quite a bit of time hunting for ones that were the moderne shape we liked, only to discover that the finish was awful: too-shiny, too-brassy, too…cheap looking. Since the knobs we found had great lines and were inexpensive,…
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From the always-illuminating Peace, Love and Noticing the Details: –“Okay, you can’t just break out into dance on the sidewalk.” –“Yes, I can.” ….Sidewalk voices, one woman to another…
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We were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn one twilight evening when we heard the mellow sound of saxaphones reverberating “a capella” through the trees. We came upon two men standing in a leafy clearing. We stopped to listen, then asked where they were from. The confident man strolling slowly with his alto soprano sax…
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via Happy Mundane via You Have Been Here via Apartment Therapy
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A couple of years ago (when ‘the improvised life’ was just an idea), we stumbled on this picture of Tobias Wong‘s file cabinet bed in Reference Library, and bookmarked it, thinking we’d write a post about it someday. It is such a great, direct idea, with many possibilities for implementing in different ways. But we…
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Constance Old recently sent us a compelling email: “After our comments exchange on your post about “American Pickers” I had a feeling I might see this table again that location agent Andrea Raisfeld plucked from my car and reworked.” And sure enough, the little table appeared completely transformed on Andrea and her husband Bill Abranowicz‘s blog A…
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Our feeling of powerlessness over the continuing oil spill in the Gulf Coast has made us feel just terrible… Until today, when the ever-wonderful Manhattan User’s Guide has published a long list of actions you can take in response to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill “large and small, short- and longterm”, from participating in a Hands-Across-The-Sand…
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Last week, we sent out a call for help in creating a tagline for ‘the improvise life’ and were knocked out by the response we got, both as Comments and as emails: an amazingly wonderful and wide array of descriptors and points of view + some disagreement (which we embrace). Pamela Hovland, who has been…
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We LOVE this teeny guerrilla action… …love that someone took the time to make this sign that makes us look again, shakes up our thinking, makes us laugh…for no obvious return: stealthy, anonymous public gift-giving. With thanks to Pamela Hovland Related posts: Cars as Paint Brushes and Other Guerrilla Activities How to Be a Guerrilla Gardener
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We know quite a few people who are working so hard these days, under the constant pressure of all there is to do, that they can’t seem to stop until they hit a wall: they get cold and need to go to bed, or find themselves sitting in front of a computer trying to write…
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From on-the-the road in California and Seattle, in hotel rooms, and in flight, we’ve been reading your thoughtful ideas for taglines, posted in Comments or sent via email – lots of them! Even far from our home base, we feel connected by the community that has grown up around ‘the improvised life’ and awed at…
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‘the improvised life’ needs a tagline on its HomePage so newcomers who jump onto the site with no introduction can get the gist quickly, and find their way more easily. We’ve been mulling possibilities for a while now and ask for your help in figuring out which of the phrases below describes the site best.…
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Periodically we like to feature the messy workspaces of artists as a reminder that being creative often means making a mess…We see it as an antidote to the shelter-magazine vision of a nice neat life that has infiltrated our heads over the years. To take the idea a step further, we thought it would be…
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We were charmed and enthralled by Jesse Rosten‘s video about expanding the world via an iPad and velcro, “two of mankind’s greatest inventions”… ….And we especially love his caveat: “Note, this is an exploration of what is possible, not necessarily what is practical.” …exploration of what is possible = the way to find the unexpected path……
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