We are totally charmed by Isabella Rosselini’s video series Green Porno about the sex lives of various inhabitants of the natural world. We check in to YouTube periodically for a ‘porno break’, which, in Rossalini’s iteration, is both charming, illuminating, funny and curiously sexy. We’re thinking Green Porno: A Book and Short Films by Isabella Rossellini,…
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We cannot THANK YOU enough for participating in the survey we posted last week. Not only has the information been extremely helpful in planning for the future of the site, but we were completely blown away by the sheer force of kindness and inspiration in your comments. For those of you who missed it, the…
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(Turn the sound off to really SEE what’s inside this book.—The Management (Video link here.) I was a child who drew inside the lines. I kept journals as a kid and, if I accidentally skipped a page, I would rip out the blank page rather than have an entry appear out of order. Only recently…
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To our minds, paint is about the easiest way to give something a new look without spending a lot of money. We have a special fondness for painted floors, since floors are a pain-in-the-neck and expensive to replace. We stumbled on this inspiring idea while leafing through Artists’ Handmade Houses: the sublime yellow floors Constantino…
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Holton Rower, whose Tall Painting got over 2,000,000 hits on YouTube (so far), sent us this photo of a car he spotted on the road. It is painted with strong, heart-felt messages that go WAY beyond the bumper sticker…easy enough to do, though it takes a kind of out-there courage. (It somehow reminds us of…
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From 2the walls, our new favorite odd tumblr find: some Ikea hacks that sent our heads spinning. We never thought of turning furnishings into clothes. (We really do want those hats).
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This is the really fast gist of a two hour presentation Richard St. John gives to high school students (Video link here). We edited the transcript down to a handy little list: “…the first thing is passion. Freeman Thomas says, “I’m driven by my passion.” Carol Coletta says, “I would pay someone to do what…
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We definitely have a thing for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms and room dividers, mentally hacking all sorts of materials, tents, and scaffolding trying to fulfill our dream of a space that could be easily and instantly divisable. We also have a thing for cardboard. So when we stumbled on this photo of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s art…
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This winter, after a few weeks of feeling pretty down, my spirits were lifted in the oddest place—a diner bathroom in Burlington, Vermont. The walls were decorated with quotes, and on the side of the stall I happened to enter was this from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”…
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Among Constantino Nivola’s inspiring outdoor garden rooms is his open air “solarium”, designed with high, white walls to reflect the sun “to such a degree that nude sunbathing was possible even in the winter.” And an artful solarium it is.
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…wonder what the backstory is?…someone who happened to be walking around with masking tape in their bag and got inspired…by what chain of free-associations…to make this great, strange, anonymous virtual chair?… via the great Mondoblogo Related posts: blue tape painting japanese masking tape in cool colors +patterns the beauty of black masking tape d-i-y blue tape…
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We love the community we see growing around ‘the improvised life’. Every day we get comments and emails that give us snippets of our readers’ lives; you inspire us daily with your creativity and support. We wonder if you would take a few minutes to fill out this survey to give us a better idea…
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Pamela Hovland alerted us to this astonishing and deeply heartening TED talk by artist Janet Echelman. (Video link here). Her “unlikely” path to making transformative monumental sculptures is a BIG FAT reminder that graduate degrees do not an artist/engineer/inventor/visionary make. This story is about taking imagination seriously. 14 years ago, I first encountered this ordinary…
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When the wooden knob came off our 50’s Danish tea kettle, we TRIED EVERYTHING we could think of make it stick tightly to its metal lid that would regularly got really hot. No longterm success. We finally put the kettle in the street hoping someone would find a use for it. We wish we’d known…
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Lately, we’ve been finding LOTS of inspiration over at Design Milk an haute design blog that features cutting-edge products. But it’s usually not the products that call us; our eye pops right away to the background. Last week, we discovered a wonderfully geometric, d-i-y-able pegboard headboard in a feature about a lacy throw made of…
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We stumbled on this video of Paul Simon performing “So Beautiful or So What”, and found the lyrics themselves to be a big fat message to ponder. Then we found a video of the riffs and starts and thinking that went into making the album and had to include that too, because it’s all about…
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Video link here. Back Tuesday afternoon. Related posts: making it up as you go along
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This weekend, Sally will be on public radio’s The Splendid Table talking with Lynne Rosetto Kasper about fresh cherries, which are at their peak now. She’ll discuss way to improvise with the fabulous fruit, and reprise her spectacular, effortless recipe Warm Fresh Cherries with ‘Leaves‘. Check Splendid Table’s website for air times. Click here to stream the…
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Lately, we’ve been whipping up quick batches of rhubarb using a recent improvisation/discovery: a thick stew of rhubarb, fragrant with honey and citrus zest, with bit of tart crunch. The trick: Throw chunks of rhubarb into a wide shallow pan slicked with a syrup of honey, white wine and lemon and orange zests. The rhubarb will cook…
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