cheap + great
Over the years, we’ve gotten A LOT of stuff second-hand, from thrift stores, flea-markets, Ebay. It’s a way to get great things MUCH cheaper than retail. (Our most recent purchase: a tag-still-on, in-warranty Eames Soft-Pad Management Chair, for a fraction of what it would cost new.) We appreciate Apartment Therapy’s national survey of Best Thrift Stores and Flea Markets of 2010. (It’s also a great last-minute resource for gifts.) A new one for us: Etsy, which has become one of the largest online retailers of vintage goods, with hundreds of thousands of sellers. Select “Vintage” from Categories and hone in on treasures from there, like this Bertoia side chair.
We love this folding circa 1960 camp stool for $26. read more…
12.22.10 |
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in cheap + great, gifts, reclaim, resources, resources blogs + sites, stores |
Maria Robledo
If you are in a last minute quandary about unusual and much appreciated gifts,visit public radio’s The Splendid Table where Sally talks with Lynne Rosetto Kasper about Homemade Holiday Food Gifts. All are easy-to-make and pack a big bang-for-the buck. Lemon-Scented Olive Oil with much of the flavor and a fraction of the price of classic Limonato – olive oil pressed with lemons – from Italy. Tuscan Herb Salt can be endlessly improvised upon, and with; it’s an instant seasoning for meats, poultry, vegetables, eggs, even popcorn and Bloody Marys. (And you can use it to season a crown roast of pork or even the Christmas goose.) Homemade Peanut Butter “Cups” are sublime rethinking of the known (and a perfect dessert).
Check out the Splendid Table’s website for recipes. You can listen here.
And here’s a trove a other Homemade Food Gift strategies from past posts:
homemade food gift: alt-malted milk balls
food gifts: homemade chocolates for improvising (recipe)
our homemade food gifts on ‘the splendid table’ (’09)
d-i-y food gift: prunes in armagnac (recipe)
12.22.10 |
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in cheap + great, family + friends, food, gifts, recipes, strategies |
Stuart Williams
Our neighbor Stuart Williams, who lives down the hall from us, sent us a holiday e-card that he designed : a great example of swell d-i-y greetings makable with design, drawing, or photo software. Use photos or graphics to design your PDF and SEND IT OUT via email, to say HELLO to lots of folks easily.
Stuart’s card also reminded us about the connectivity of ideas that happens in an apartment building or a neighborhood, when folks start talking to each other and asking “What are you up to these days?” On elevator rides in our building, we’ve gotten make-up lessons from a professional make-up artist, and learned about the Secrets of Paris Department Stores. We became friends with Couturier de Cardboard Matthew Sporzynski, and the recipient of his stealth gift-giving.
Stopping to chat one day, we discovered that our neighbor Stuart is a site-specific, environmental artist. He created the Luminous Earth Grid, a vast array of 1,680 fluorescent lamps, which swept over the undulating landscape north of San Francisco (in an expanse equal to eight football fields), like an immense electrified quilt: read more…
12.21.10 |
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in art, cheap + great, community, family + friends, materials, share, sightings, technology |
Joel Henriques
We are big fans of d-i-y gift wrapping made of found, free, repurposed or cheap materials. Why spend the money on bought wrap when there’s so much good stuff just lying around. We really like Joel Henriques’ idea (of the ever-inspiring blog Made by Joel): use torn out pages from old art magazines…
or design magazines…
or foreign language newspapers newspapers…
…or kid’s drawings…
His paper-cutouts-as-ribbons are swell, too! read more…
12.19.10 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, copy this!, family + friends, gifts, inspiration blogs + sites, materials, reclaim, strategies |
Even though we mostly give charity donations as our holiday gifts, we DO like giving a few more tangible gifts as well, ones that are not too pricey and give a big bang for the buck. So we’ve compiled our eclectic list of favorite things to give…and get.
In addition, on Friday we’ll be talking about some Homemade Food Gifts on public radio’s The Splendid Table (for last year’s food gifts, see the links below). And if you were to type “GIFTS” or “KIDS” into ‘the improvised life”s Search box, you’d find lots of gift possibilities we’ve written about over the past year and a half, from books to leather-welding-gloves-as-oven-mitts (not to mention my brilliant sister’s oddly brilliant gift ideas).
One of the most appreciated gifts we’ve given lately are these French paring knives with colorful painted handles, made by the venerable knife company L’Econome. They are inexpensive as paring knives go – about $10 each – and do what any good paring knife should: feel good in the hand, sharpen easily and stay sharp, look good, even as they age and weather. EVERYBODY needs a good paring knife. A green handled one is now the favorite knife of my friend Maria, who LOVES green. (We buy them in different colors to keep in our “gift” drawer, just in case.) read more…
12.14.10 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, family + friends, gifts, housewares, resources, tools |
Holton Rower
Don’t have the $$ to buy art? You can barter for it at ArtBarter, a 3-day exhibition at NP Contemporary Art Centre in New York City, where all the art displayed is for non-money sale. You submit a secret postcard which will be given to the artist whose work you covet. Then he/she will decide from their array of proposals who they’ll barter with. We’re going to see if we can barter for a piece by Holton Rower, who we’re big fans of; he works in a vast array of materials including locks, pipes, fish hooks, human hair, plywood, paint…like this wood block filled with money, and a ‘weaving’ made of locks, below.
We LOVE bartering and see this exhibition as a hopeful sign of its growth and viability for acquiring art. We know that bartering alive and well in other areas like services, vehicles, places to stay… and at online at sites like U-Exchange.
Here are some of the things people offered artist Charlotte Duale for her etching, in a previous ArtBarter: read more…
12.07.10 |
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in art, cheap + great, resources, stores |
Sally Schneider
Alert !!: ‘the improvised life is THRILLED to be part a very cool group post called NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays, the ultimate holiday guide by New York’s best bloggers, from unique gifts to the most celebratory libations, to Christmas with Andy Warhol. Be sure to check out it; it’s on the Home Page now, and here, or just scroll down to the bottom of this post.
We’re big fans of giving money to a charity in our friends’ names, in lieu of the usual gift that nobody needs. So every year, we send out a big pile of charity gift cards to friends. We’d address and stamp the envelopes, wondering if there was an alternative way to send our greeting/gift that would save paper, stamps, and energy but still deliver the message in a festive way.
We steered clear of email cards because we couldn’t find any that delivered the visual message we wanted AND because they lacked an envelope, which we think an essential part of the pleasure of receiving a card.
Until recently. We discovered Paperless Post, a website that allows you to design your own cards (to a degree) and then send them in a sort of digital envelope that the recipient gets to open online. Once you create an account, your first few cards are free; after that, the charge is a fraction of what snailmail costs. It’s the envelope that got us. read more…
11.30.10 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, family + friends, how-to, resources, services |
Sally Schneider
Last year, we were invited to the collective Thanksgiving dinner of several families. One person oversaw the wines, turkey and stuffing; others made desserts and side dishes. Another improvised the huge 16-foot-long table that would seat 18 hungry grown-ups and children. It was not until we were helping deconstruct the table at the end of the evening that we realized it was made of two 4-x-8-foot sheets of plywood placed end to end on our host’s dining table.
Plywood is a fine, inexpensive material for making tabletops in a variety of shapes, from rectangles, to squares to rounds. Since the table will be covered with a cloth, it doesn’t really matter what the plywood looks like – whether veneered or not. Thickness should depend on the supports underneath; it shouldn’t bow. (If you are a person who likes to have plywood on-hand for projects, then it makes sense to buy what you will re-use).
Last year’s table-maker happened to have a huge Frette linen tablecloth (from a past life) just large enough to cover. At party last summer, he cut open a new duvet cover to make a huge tablecloth that went to the floor. We’re fine with “piecing” tablecloths – that is, overlapping whatever we have one hand to make a patchwork. But many fabrics will do, from sheets to bolts of linen and cotton on line, to muslin doubled up.
And of course, plates, silverware, napkins and glasses will invariably be cobbled together from different sets to make the right number, with great charm and warmth.
In the pictures that follow, you can see the beautiful Thanksgiving table, above, gradually deconstructed. Check out our d-i-y on making a big folding round table. read more…
11.21.10 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, family + friends, food, furniture, hard, how-to, inspiration, materials, resources, solutions, strategies |
Tara Mann
Years ago a friend devised an interesting table top to use for big dinner parties. She had two half-circles cut from two 4′x 8′ sheets of plywood. Then she hinged them together at the straight sides with a piano hinge. It opened up like a book to become an round 8-foot-diameter table top which she placed, hinge-side-down, on her smaller round table (the base). She covered the rig with a pale yellow linen cloth and set it with her best china and silver. Her guests never knew what lay beneath the beautiful setting. To store the top, she folded it in half and slid it under the sofa where it stayed, out of sight, until the next party.
Our rough map of how to make it is below. You can make any size top you wish using this method. We recommend the biggest size that you can a) balance safely on whatever base(s) you have, and b) are able to store easily (figure the length, width and height when folded). Or use the essential idea to make a hinged rectangle that would fold to hide under a bed or behind a door, similar to the one we wrote about a few weeks ago. Folding sawhorses make a good base (we keep a pair in the closet). Check out our d-i-y on making a huge rectangular table out of plywood.
read more…
11.21.10 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, family + friends, food, furniture, hard, how-to, materials, resources, solutions, strategies |
Emily Larned
In Lookbook 54, artists Emily Larned and Roxane Zargham created 54 different improvisations on one XL white t-shirt, using common household supplies (binder clips, safety pins, duct tape) as styling aids. They set serious constraints for themselves: The shirt is never cut or permanently altered, and all the accessories serve a function.
In their singular work, they seek to answer the question:
“What is the most reductive form that can yield the most variety in meaning? Possibly the white t-shirt. Tight it is James Dean, huge it is hip hop. It’s not what you wear, it’s how you wear it.”
They expand the view of what’s possible in the realm of ordinary t-shirt. read more…
11.17.10 |
comments (3) |
in apparel, cheap + great, identity, materials, soft, textiles |
Like the website Knock-Off in Style, we love the challenge of finding an affordable version of some great piece of design – not necessarily a “knock-off” but an object of similar lines and intention, that is cheap. We’ve loved this wool Ikea PS Stuga rug (9′ x 9′, $299) from the moment we saw it, but think it’s even more of a value since we saw this printed dhurrie by John Robshaw (6′ x 9′, $795) featured on Better Living Through Design: read more…
11.16.10 |
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in cheap + great, elements, floors, inside, resources, soft, stores, textiles |
