I woke up this morning to discover a tiny birch tree rising amidst my city quasi-garden, having overcome unthinkable odds to float its seed over heaps of concrete and glass, and begin a life in a meager oasis of soil. And I thought, my god*, what a miracle. What magic. What a reminder that life does not await permission to be lived.
(Video link here.) We laughed out loud at Samuel L. Jackson’s new video, an exortation for apathetic Obama supportors to get off their asses and take some action in the election. (It’s a play on his last year’s wildly successful children’s story “Go the Fu*k to Sleep.) It worked; we donated some $$ for a start.
And we figure that whatever side your on, the deeper message is essential: take part in the politics of your nation; it’s your home.
We love the simple white-on-concrete? stencils designer Paola Navone put in her Greek summer home. They act like rugs, and can be done on wood floors as well. We’ve seen this done before, but not quite so beautifully. read more…
About a year ago, our friend Ellen Silverman came back from France with a beautiful linen flat sheet that she’d seen displayed in a Paris shop. The salesperson encouraged her to buy a king size sheet and use it as a coverlet that would drape on the floor and become it’s own “dust-ruffle”, hiding whatever lay hidden under the bed. It looked so pretty, and seemed like such a practical idea, that we hatched a plot to photograph it; both being so crazy-busy we still haven’t gotten around to it.
So I was pleased to stumble on a similar image buried in a recent Remodelista house tour. This huge flat-sheet coverlet is made of gauze but linen is lovely, washable, comes in a variety of colors, and doesn’t need to be ironed. Wrinkled is fine, as are ripped edges. We’re wondering what would happen if read more…
The amazing avant-garde musician Fast Forward has joinged forces with his friend Elaine Sokolof to create a charming and illuminating Facebook page ”Not Better Just Different”. (It’s public, so you don’t have to be a member of Facebook .
Fast wrote us that they started the page just to “try something out and see what happens”, our mantra.
We love it because there’s lots of quick hits that shift our view, like read more…
Since our every early post Concrete Block Love, about a table base Marcel Breuer had designed of concrete blocks, we’ve posted quite a few posts about concrete blocks and what you can do with them. We LOVE them because they are so mundane with so much potential to be stylish.
The other day we discovered a fantasy concrete block made out of a big Lego mold. By fantasy we mean they aren’t readily available for sale, though the should be (apparently, they are one or two sources online that will custom make them).
They’re stackable (up to a point) and wonderful looking, the perfect combo-platter: concrete block and Lego. Having a good amount of inteior channeling, we imagine they’d be better than common concrete blocks. read more…
We love the glossy white wall tiles used as white board at Bar & Co. a bistro-style bar in Helsinki, a great idea for a kitchen wall. We’re suddenly viewing our oversized rectangular bathroom tiles in a new way: message boards (with the possibility for leaving little wash-off-able notes in a normally scriptless room). read more…
We love copper pipe and have blogged a fab diy table made of it as well as sculptural faucets. But this picture of this Amsterdam coffee shop took our copper imaginings to new heights: copper pipe light fixtures, copper pipe faucets, and copper pipe hooks, all in one space!! read more…
Chilewich is a brand of chic, minimalist woven polypropalene floor mat that is a staple in design magazines. You’d think the material from which they’re made – woven polypropyline – would be available in off-brands, but we haven’t found any in our searches. (We did, however, find a number of seller’s on Ebay who sell seconds or discontinued styles; Chilewich mats aren’t cheap.) We’ve been thinking of possibly using a Chilewich floor mat for the kitchen whose painted plywood floors take a lot of wear and tear. So we ordered some samples from Chilewich’s site.
From having cooked seriously and sometimes wildly-with-a-number-of-cooks-at-once, we know about all the bits of food that can end up ground into the kitchen floor, from scraps of fat from trimmed meat to fruit peels. We worried that all this stuff would mash into the weave and make for more work than we want. So we decided to do a test to see if the Chilewich would really clean easily despite our abuse. read more…
(Video link here.) Yesterday, we posted a thought-provoking sign we’d seen that we were mulling: “The work you do while procastinating is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life”. Curious that at the same time, Brain Pickings was posting about procastination also, in a completely different way. Their post featured a little video about the “science” of procrastination, and ways to “manage” it, as though procastination were a thorny problem, rather than part of the creative process or perhaps even, activities with a message*.
Right after we watched this very charming, pat video, we received a comment from a long-time reader responding to our procrastination post and a Related Post she’d read called “Leap and the Net Will Appear”. It gives a totally OTHER view of procastination:
dearest improvised life, as i close out this jewish year preparing for yom kippur, your series of messages came through this morning. three months ago i was dx with esophogeal cancer. i have faced many things in life, i am 72, and this one was met with elevated spiritual strength from within and enormous support from dear loved ones. there have been some game changes these last few weeks, but my vote is for both procrastination and spiritual elevation!!!! its all good. thank you so much for this blog…it helps me in many ways. love, suzy read more…
Holton Rower sent us this photo from his travels in Argentina. In the courtyard of Home Hotel in Buenos Aires he found a suprisingly crocheted tree. (Those crochet bombers are everywhere…)
After our friend Lisa Morphew took a shovel and demolished the wall separating our living room and bedroom of our soon-to-be-renovated space, we sent a photo of the newly-opened room to our friend Tom Fallon, an interior designer whose given us lots of great ideas over the years. He emailed back: It’s great. Why not keep it the way it is?
Well, we thought, the idea IS great, but practically speaking, we just wouldn’t be able to do all the things we needed to do in that space. We ended up demolishing the entire wall to open up the room, and finishing the walls in the usual manner i.e. sheetrocking and painting (all except one, that moves, but that’s another story).
Recently, we saw a wonderful iteration of Tom’s idea from designer Faye Toogood who cut a wall between rooms read more…
In the process of planning our Laboratory’s renovation, we called on a number of friends for advice: designers, artists, and people who just had plain good sense of one kind or another. When I told artist friend Lisa Morphew of the prices some of the contractors we’d spoken to were quoting us she said: “Honey, what you want to do isn’t rocket science. It shouldn’t cost so much.” Lisa, who had worked construction and transformed a wreck of a house in North Carolina into a wondrous space, proceeded to give us a lesson in how our place was made.
Pointing to the sheetrock wall that bisected the living rooms and second bedroom which we were dying to take down, she said “I could take that down with a shovel if you have one. I’ll show you how easy it is, and you’ll understand how it’s made”. A shovel?!! We didn’t have a shovel on hand so we went around to the hardware store and bought one then and there. We weren’t going to miss the chance to see that wall come down.
Lisa, and a friend, proceeded to demolish the wall in less than half an hour. read more…
We found this sign on French by Design last week and have been mulling it ever since. It’s a quote by graphic designer Jessica Hische, whose work if full of inventive and often very generous ideas (Check out the site, Mom, This is How Twitter Works. Also, click the heart at the top right of her website to switch modes-of-viewing. Our favorite: Teen Girl Mode.)
Hische’s quote has been making us look at the work we do when we don’t feel like writing, processing photos, taking care of paperwork, dealing with the massive amounts of ‘to-do’s on our work table…
Is the stuff we retreat into REALLY what we should be doing? It is a statement that resonates, pushing us to look farther into the idea of work and right livelihood, a question a lot of folks are dealing with these days. We’re tracking the ways we procrastinate to see if there’s a message to be heard.
Truer for us perhaps: the things we want to do when we procastinate is probably the work we should be doing…
