The Improvisational Cook free giveaway ends Thursday at midnight so you’ve got a couple of days left if you haven’t entered. Click here for the super-easy entry requirements and to find out about Sally’s award-winning cookbook. Scroll down to the Comments to read some truly inspired improvisations. We’ll announce the winner on Friday afternoon.
Related post: book giveaway: ‘the improvisational cook’
We recently saw a business card after our own hearts. Dave Hakkins made a stamp the same size as a normal business card so that he could stamp it on ANYTHING. He cuts out card size rectangles of paper, cloth, cereal boxes and then just stamps them: each one is a surprise. By this method, he’s managed to address what he likes and doesn’t about the classic business card:
“The good thing about business cards is that you have something touchable, what’s bad is that it always costs material and you will probably never hand out all the 500 pieces.” read more…
Liz Massey of Creative Liberty blog featured an interview called with Sally in her April e-newsletter. Check it out here to learn how ‘the improvised life’ came about, and Sally’s rant-ette on the creative process, how cooking relates to improvising, and the benefits of adopting an improvisational frame of mind… Here’s an excerpt:
What advice would you have for someone who’d like to become more improvisational in their life, but is afraid to try?
Fear, of course, can put the kibosh on anything if you let it. People tell me they are afraid they will fail, make mistakes, look like a fool, not be perfect, break the taboo of who they are “supposed” to be …
I view improvising as a practice: when you have an idea you’d like to try, even if you think you’ll be terrible at it, or that it will be a failure, ask yourself why not? and try it. If possible, suspend the inhibiting idea of doing things perfectly. If you are afraid of people judging you, work in private at first, but do it, take the step to see what happens if you try out your idea. Just doing that much is liberating. With practice, it gets easier and easier, and then there’s no way you cannot continue, because it is thrilling and incredibly illuminating.
Is there anything else on this topic you’d like to add?
When you have an idea, I recommend asking yourself: “what would happen if …?” and “why not?”, and saying YES instead of NO frequently. Perfection is overrated. read more…
Cathy Grunfeld
Design blogs and magazines love to feature chic beds where the platform base is quite a bit bigger than the mattress, making them look wonderfully architectural and modern. We discovered that the REALITY of these beds is that when we get in or out of them (or on or off), we scrape our shins on the hard edge of platform…unless we remember to stretch our legs way out to miss the edge (too much work for a sleepy person). We’ve added it to our mental file of design whose good looks belie what it’s like to actually use it. read more…
Sally Schneider
MANY years ago, when we barely knew who Anni Albers was, we clipped a quote of hers from a magazine, and have had it on our fridge ever since. It is faded and yellowed, but resonates as strongly as ever:
“Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.”
The idea of ”listening” to materials, to what wants to be done, is an essential part of improvising. It can take practice, but we find that as you do it, you cultivate an ability to hear… read more…
Jonathan Winters was known for his astonishing ability to improvise with anything anyone handed him. We are amazed at the 4 inspiring minutes he did with a stick on the Jack Paar Show. Total LOL. We thought we’d find out a little more about him and found this nugget in his Wikipedia entry:
His career began as a result of a lost wristwatch, about six or seven months after his marriage to Eileen. The newlyweds couldn’t afford to buy another one. Then Eileen read about a talent contest in which the first prize was a wristwatch, and encouraged Jonathan to “go down and win it.” She was certain he could… and he did. His performance led to a disk jockey job, where he was supposed to introduce songs and announce the temperature. Gradually his ad libs, personas and antics took over the show.
He’s another great example of a person stumbling on their calling…(or perhaps, their calling finding them…) We LOVE his wise take on success:
“I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.”
Related post: blog watch: ‘design thought leader’
Usually when we’ve wanted to figure out the right color to paint a room, we’ve bought samples and painted swatches right on the wall. This method works pretty well if you are only choosing ONE color. But what if you want to use several or many colors in a room or throughout the house? We love this strategy that location agent Andrea Reisfeld and photographer William Abranowicz posted on their blog A +B See, after they consulted with color-genius Eve Ashcraft, whose advised the likes of Martha Stewart on paint colors:
“We bought sample sizes of all 17 options, and painted them on sheets of mason board which had been primed with white.
Now, we can place the colors in their proper rooms throughout the house, and see how they work against the floor color choices and against rooms within the same sightlines. We’ll be able to see how the colors look in the light of our house, bright days, dark days and night time.”
It is SUCH a good idea, allowing you to move colors around at will.
Read more about Andrea and Bill’s big color changes here. You’ll find lots of color and other inspiration at Ashcraft’s blog Studio Horn.
Related post: greece for $31
color-painted panels as decorative element
d-i-y reverse painted glass as wall covering and…
our lesson in pink (paint)
Maria Robledo
Our friend Maria Robledo sent this wonderful photo with the message ‘Thinking of u’. It is one of the many messages we’ve gotten during the past week from friends and strangers who knew we’d lost dear ones recently, and traveled last weekend for a memorial service in the West Virginia Appalachians. Using dial-up internet connection, we read the Comments and emails from people responding to our post. We found ourselves comforted by people we’d never met, but were connected to by the virtual community that is ‘the improvised life’. The world is amazing.
And even though just a few days ago in West Virginia, we drove through strange, beautiful pink fog, and then SNOW for days, we are reminded that baby artichokes mean that Spring is here! To celebrate the season, we include a swell artichoke recipe from The Improvisational Cook (check out the upcoming giveaway).
Recipe: Pasta with Baby Artichokes read more…
Although we’ve always thought of ourselves as rather minimalist, we’ve been realizing that we have attachments to things that we don’t really want or need anymore, and have a hard time letting them go. What we are really attached to are the memories and associations the object spurs, afraid we’d lose the memory if we could never see the object again. As a solution, we started photographing things we wanted to let go of to create a digital archive of “Memory Stuff”. It freed us up to give stuff away.
Now we have a photo to remind us the tiny blue-gray pebbles we collected as we sat for hours on a beach near San Francisco talking to a friend many years ago…We don’t need to write anything down, because the memories are within us, called up instantly.
We discovered a variation of this strategy in a recent SwissMiss post called Eulogy of Stuff; it quoted a Comment left on an Apartment Therapy thread by a reader named slocumnavigator: read more…
On the lookout for flower pots with sleek modern lines, we love this one made from a hacked Ikea lamp. Says creative hackeress Heloisa Fiasco of Raleigh, NC:
“I bought this ceiling lamp at the AS IS section of Ikea. When I saw it I thought it would be the perfect modern flower pot that is so hard to find for an affordable price.
It already has an opening in the bottom where the wire would normally go. Instead the water can make an exit through there now.”
via Ikea Hackers
Genius. Have brain. Will travel.
What if we actually thought that way?
Related posts: out of work?: retrofit your business card!
our handmade business card
rethinking business cards
What would your day be like if you did a little freeform dancing in the middle of it?
(We need to do this MORE!)
via Constant Siege
Cathy Grunfeld
Spotted in the left hand corner of this Corsican kitchen, a sink so wide and shallow that it can be used as a “wet” work surface, to wash and pare the artichokes or any other vegetable. Shallow sinks fly in the face of usual thinking of “the deeper the better”. For deep sinks make us have to bend over and work in an uncomfortable position, whether it be washing dishes or cleaning lettuce. We prefer shallowish sinks, our ideal being the custom-made one our friend Margot Wellington had made for her East Hampton kitchen, which allows her to pile dirty dishes at one end, and prep food on the other.
via French by Design
Related post: sink as work surface, designed by a cook
We’ve just returned from a visit to Helvetia, West Virginia where two dear friends had passed away within a couple of weeks of each other. Both lived long amazingly rich lives that touched a great many people. We came home tired, thoughtful, amazed, sad, inspired…and slowly started back to work on ‘the improvised life’. As often happens, we stumbled on something that resonated deeply with what we’d been thinking about: Candy Chang’s public art project Before I Die. Chang found a derelict building in New Orleans, painted its sides with chalkboard paint and stenciled the question “Before I die I want to____________” ; she left spaces for people to fill in with chalk. Says Chang:
“It’s a question that has changed me in the last year, and I believe the design of our public spaces can better reflect what’s important to us as residents and as human beings. The responses and stories from passersby while we were installing it have already hit me hard in the heart.” read more…
Seth Godin via Design Thought Leader
Design Thought Leader posts daily quotes by some of the world’s most compelling thought leaders. We find them both inspiring and illuminating, and like this one, often heartening:
“…we have no real choice in the matter. The voice in our heads won’t shut up until we discover if we’re right, if we can do it, if we can make something happen.”
That’s totally what we’re doing at ’the improvised life…no choice in the matter..have to!
