As is our nature, we started to deconstruct this strangely beautiful fly swatter, thinking it could easily be made with a piece of hardwood and a bit of leather. Then we thought: why bother? It only costs $12.80 + $5 shipping at Kaufman Mercantile.
We figure it would make a great, slightly odd, original and much-appreciated house gift for summer weekends. After all, most fly swatters are ugly and made of funky plastic. This one allows for chicly WHAMMING the occasional fly or mosquito, while being nice to look at during its off hours.
Kaufman Mercantile has some swell pricier items that provide inspiration and self-evident-how-tos for making them yourself: read more…
Maria Robledo sent us a link to Under the Sun, Roy Arden’s brilliant visual blog, which we are fans of but hadn’t looked at in some time; there’s ALWAYS something compelling there. This time, we found a picture of women wearing wondrous head dresses made of wrapped fabric. ‘We need to be able to do that’ we thought, and looked up how to make fab hats with a piece of fabric. Here are two short, curiously charming how-to’s to set you on the path (with the women, above, as further inspiration for improvising…a LONG swath of striped fabric folded lengthwise and warpped overlappingly). read more…
It appears the table is one of those tantelizing design one-offs that would cost a fortune to buy. We’ve seen a number of iterations of the idea over the past few years. For us, it has the essential design flaw of regular-size Post-It notes: that awful yellow color.
So of course, we set about figuring out how to MAKE our own custom post-it table, with paper we like. Here are two approaches: read more…
We were stunned at the news of Nora Ephon‘s passing, wondering how could it be? It seemed like she would always be here. As columnist Liz Smith wrote: “What the hell will we do without you?”
We’ve Believe that we can learn just about anything we put our mind to… eventually ….sometimes with a lot of help and concentration. Finances is one of the areas we find ourselves – and a lot of creative people we know – weakest at. So we’ve taken delight in a New York Times blog called Bucks, where financial planner Carl Richards teaches Basics of Personal Finance with drawings on napkins, as a parent might to a son or daughter across a kitchen table. What we like is that Richards takes a bigger view of finance than usual, helping us to understand that our time and energy are also valuable assets, as in one of our favorite posts Why Most Investors Don’t Measure Returns Correctly. Here’s a snippet of the commentary that went with the drawing, above.
There’s an old saying that you should take a look at your checkbook and your calendar to see what you really value as opposed to what you say you value, because the calendar and the checkbook never lie… read more…
Fast Company recently published Failure Does Not Suck, an interview with Sir James Dyson, who spent 15 years inventing the world’s best-selling vacuum cleaner, among other paradigm-altering housewares. Here’s a potent snippet:
You once described the inventor’s life as “one of failure.” How so?
I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative. read more…
(Video link here.) David Saltman sent us this video with the message “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS”. And he was right, despite its 13 minutes, which is long for us. This 60 Minute profile tells the story of pianist Derek Paravicini who is blind, with disabilities so severe, he can’t tell his right hand from his left. But man, is this a story of unexpected redemption, of extraordinary gifts that can lie hidden in what may have seemed to a be profoundly limited life. It took a young piano teacher who ‘saw’ and nurtured Derek’s musical language, never imagining quite where it would lead.
A couple of weeks after we posted the versatile tinkertoy plate holder we’d bought at Crate and Barrel and hacked…er…tailored it to suit our big platters, we discovered that Crate and Barrel had done some hacking as well. They added an edge and painted them rustic white, and are using them throughout the store to display all manner of goods, from CD’s to framed pictures (photo at bottom). We bought another set, thinking we’d found the perfect customizable holder for all kinds of things…
The harsh reality of white-painted floors like the ones in our ‘laboratory’ is that they are prone to scratching and losing their pristine look FAST. Since our plywood floors were painted a beautiful oyster shell white (THAT story to come in a later post), it has been our personal challenge to GET OVER the fact that they will get nicked, scratched, stained and who knows what else…
The solution: to view them as a canvas to paint as we wish, when we wish, WHAT we wish. We’ve started a mental file of possibilities. The zig-zag pattern on this rug would translate easily to being painted on the floor read more…
It was raining late this afternoon as we sat writing in ‘the improvised life’s laboratory‘ with the terrace door open. Suddenly we heard the joyous sound of a full-on gospel choir coming through the trees of the Harlem park we look out on. We went out onto the terrace to see who was singing. Instead we saw a lone man sitting under an umbrella (which is there, though it blends with the surroundings) on a bench in the park, taking a moment to enjoy the soft rain and the music reverating through the wet leaves.
After we posted about clear white board paint, which would allow you to write/and erase any wood or painted surface, Diary of a Tomato alerted us to the very cool alt-whiteboards spotted at Noma Foodlab, an ambitious restaurant and food “experimentarium” in Copenhagen. In the huge high-design loft space, big slabs of glass are afixed to the walls to display notes and lists.
Just to make sure you really could write on glass and then erase it, we tried marking the bottom of a jelly glass with a Sharpie… read more…
We often post ideas on ‘the improvised life’ that we might never make, like the futurist cinder block artist Tom Sachs displayed at recent exhibition Space Program Mars. There is a simple, practical logic to this: these creations remind us of do-able possibilities that, had we the time or wherewithall, we COULD make ourselves.
Sach’s wonderful block is made with ordinary materials: plywood bored with holes, flat corner irons, flat-head screws, possibly a skim of concrete for texture. We find the image infiltrating our prejudices, shifting the notion of what a cinder block can be, offering up the possibilitiy that we can view our daily norms in radically different ways, and maybe, with stuff hidden in our tool chest or at the hardware store, create something new.
Having no hidden rooms in our apartments, we have written a number of posts mulling ways to make an “instant”, impermanent guest room in our space. They are usually along the lines of something a kid would make, since secretly, we love the feeling of forts, teepees, treehouses. We are always on the lookout for materials with which we might quickly rig such a private space in our big open room, to enclose a guest bed, be a meditation room, a hideout.
So we were smitten when we read about Fort Magic, a kit full of PVC pipes and connecters and clips with which you can make Tinkertoy-like structures to attach sheets or fabrics. Designed for kids but it see,s perfectly suits our adult fantasies. read more…
Some time ago we wrote about IdeaPaint, special paint that can turn any surface into a dry erase “white board”. You can write all your brilliant ideas on it with markers, then wipe them off when you don’t need them anymore. Now the IdeaPaint people have come out with a great variation on the theme: CLEAR IdeaPaint, that can be painted on virtually any painted wall or wood surface. Paint it on your exotically colored wall, or a plywood wall or door. It ain’t cheap—about $225 covers 50 feet.
But as we settle into our new space and laboratory, we’re constantly thinking about the possibility in writing our many ideas on walls…and then erasing. We’re reminded of the folks at IDEO, read more…
, a kit full of PVC pipes and connecters and clips with which you can make Tinkertoy-like structures to attach sheets or fabrics. Designed for kids but it see,s perfectly suits our adult fantasies. 
, that can be painted on virtually any painted wall or wood surface. Paint it on your exotically colored wall, or a plywood wall or door. It ain’t cheap—about $225 covers 50 feet.
