We’ve checked out A LOT of d-i-y shipping pallet furniture, and have been contemplating possibilities for plywood shelving with unfinished edges. Today we realized the simple key to keeping these recycled wood creations from bordering on “granola” and making them more stylish: paint them. White is always reliable (dig this white-painted coffee table), but black or dark gray can do wonders. Apart’s black sofa made (carefully) of shipping pallet wood and painted black is a great example of the possibilities, even in rougher iterations: read more…
We are big fans of the blog Mondoblogo, where we find long, beautiful, mostly visual posts that almost always expand our vision. There’s a strong leaning toward art and mid-century design, but also just the pure joy of seeing as evidenced by the category “Walks”.
Scroll through and you’ll find photographic riffs of walks through parts of Brooklyn (yesterday’s walk is a beaut!) or Manhattan that remind us that all we have to do is look around us – REMEMBER to look – as we move from one place to another, to find treasures hidden all over the place. Seeing is practice, and just taking a random walk is one of the best ways to start. Our absolute favorite Mondoblogo walk was from “somewhere in Soho”, called ‘Peepin Hole’: read more…
We love these curiously chic duct-tape safety glasses and assumed they were made by duct taping an existing pair of glasses, until we found the how-to and list of ingredients: duct tape, a hanger, a beer bottle and two plastic furniture caster cups. Will wonders never cease??!!!
A friend once told us that when she was young, she learned to draw from Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World. We recently checked it out, and loved how Emberley breaks down a drawing: using simple shapes as building blocks, you create objects and faces one piece at a time. Even those of us who aren’t artistically inclined can follow along. read more…
(Video link here.) Last week, Open Culture ran two incredibly illuminating videos in tandem: the first, below, is the comedian Louis C.K telling of being at a low point in his career, having done the same old comedy routine for 15 years and getting nowhere, when he happened to hear George Carlin talk about how he came to figure out who he REALLY was, and the work he was really meant to do. Carlin’s example totally changed Louis C.K.’s life, eventually bringing him massive success. The second video, above, was Carlin telling part of the story C.K. heard. The story of Carlin’s process of becoming is interesting and valuable; as usual we notated the essential bits.
I realized…that I didn’t fit. And here’s what was missing: I was missing who I was.
What I really was was an outlaw and a rebel…I didn’t give a shit. It’s important in life if you don’t give a shit. It can help you a lot. read more…
We’ve long been fans of unhemmed linen tableclothes, napkins, shower curtains – a rectangle of pure linen just ripped to leave a raw edge *. We hadn’t though of this swell embellishment: the yarn stitching accentuates the intentionality of NOT-HEMMED in a really beautiful and charming way. read more…
When we want to wake/shake up our thinking, we check in at Dominic Wilcox‘s blog Variations on Normal. You never know what that clever guy will come up with. We especially love his month-long project, Speed Creating. Every day for 30 consecutive days, HE practiced waking up his thinking by making something creative with whatever was at hand in the course of his day, whether at home, in his studio, on the subway – anywhere. Writes Wilcox:
I believe that this self-imposed project with it’s constraints on time and money will force me to take an instinctive and experimental approach. The fear of failure and the usual time spent thinking through the potential pitfalls of a project will not be an option and I will need to react swiftly to my thoughts, observations and experimental outcomes discovered along the way. I am not focused solely on the final objects or images but on the creative journey I take. Complete failures are expected and embraced.
We love that Wilcox created a practice with inbuilt constraints designed to push his own limits and experiment, embracing the possibility of failure. You can see the 30 projects he came up with here. We especially love his Measuring Tape Diary made by spray painting an extended measuring tape white, and then recording the events of his day on it. We can imagine someone – or Wilcox himself – coming across it years later, and opening it up to discover…a day.
Check out his curiously beautiful Onion Ring Fabric made by glueing together bright orange onion crisps with flexible glue: read more…
(Video link here.) Although we’ve spent decades improvising in the kitchen (figuring out ways to cure hams in a city apartment and make souffles in iron skillets and teacups) we haven’t embraced molecular gastronomy in our everyday cooking. We enjoy its magical qualities on forays to the restaurants of inventive chefs like Wylie Dufresne and Daniel Humm….and now on YouTube with Alinea’s edible helium-filled balloon. We WOULD love to experience this triumph of fun, imagination and beauty (especially knowing that it started with Alinea chef Grant Achatz asking himself “What if…” and then figuring out how to do it.)
While we find we can go pretty far pushing the limits of ordinary cooking equipment, there is one esoteric tool we have found truly useful: The Smoking Gun. It’s a battery-powered pistol that turns hardwood sawdust like cherry, applewood and hickory into fragrant smoke with which you can infuse all manner of food read more…
Our friend and resident oenophile Anthony Giglio snapped this picture of a rather bold and desperate masking tape repair. We see it as a fine example of what we are frequently told is the powerful effect of reading ‘the improvised life’ daily: gradually you’re vision changes. You not only ‘see’ and delight in found improvisations around you, but you also find yourself improvising solutions to all sorts of dilemmas.
Who needs an auto body shop?
This crazy repair eminded us of There I Fixed It, a blog chock full of desperate, uninhibited and sometimes brilliant fixes.
We’ve written about painting chair and table legs, and we’ve written about pink but we’ve never considered putting the two ideas together…until we came across this image of just one leg of a chair painted pink. It’s a lovely visual surprise that makes an old chair looks like it’s dressed to-the-nines.
Although in reality, every leg of this table is painted pink, this picture got us imagining how just one leg or even two legs painted would look: much better to our eye. read more…
The Guardian recently wrote about Bonnie Ware, an Austalian palliative care nurse who counseled and cared for the dying. Over many conversations with her patients, she heard five main regrets expressing things that they would have done differently. We find that rather than being a downer, they are a big gift, offering great perspective about shifts we might wish to make NOW:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. read more…
This uplifting bit of graffiti brings out the guerilla in us. We don’t WE become anonymous graffiti artists and leave uplifting (and impermanent) messages around town? All it would take is carrying a piece of chalk (easy to carry)… read more…
Ever since we gave up paying a personal trainer to keep us exercising, we’ve been slipping and sliding around with staying disciplined, and EXPLORING ways to get our heads and bodies into healthy work outs. Here are two simple strategies that we’ve found remarkably helpful:
1) posting this image on our wall (and in our heads). It’s a series of MRI images comparing cross-sections of muscles: a simple powerful message.
2) follow Leo Barbuta of Zen Habit’s advice: start small, and exercise in tiny bits, having fun while you do it, gradually building up to a routine that you work into your life:
“When the actions are tiny, they are easy. You have no excuse. You can do them anywhere, all day long…
I fold fitness into my life, like blueberries into batter, and it becomes a part of the recipe, not just a topping.”
. We recently checked it out, and loved how Emberley breaks down a drawing: using simple shapes as building blocks, you create objects and faces one piece at a time. Even those of us who aren’t artistically inclined can follow along. 
