photo: paul raeside
Spotted in a long post on Desire to Inspire showing work of interiors photographer Paul Raeside: walls with roughly painted stripes. Right up our alley: graphical, imperfect, charming, do-able…though perhaps not as easy as it looks (we’d practice first on some scraps sheets of plywood or walls we plan to paint over, or even heavy paper tacked on the wall). read more…
photo: sally schneider
We recently stumbled on a cool Japanese site that will instantly transmute any photo you upload to an aged version “like over 100 to 150 years old.”
On the upper right corner of the site you can ‘English’ to see a translation. You choose the file where it says to, and then click the blue box below it to upload. Wait a minute and you’ll your photo transformed.
The photo above is the vintage-ized version of this one we took of Palais Royale in Paris a couple of years ago:
A satisfying find from the recently-redesigned Remodelista: Anthropologie’s Ephemera Clip. Made of distressed iron (wonder if it will rust…then it might get REALLY beautiful), with a hole in one handle so you can hang it, it is like a little sculpture…Endlessly useful for clipping together receipts, papers, closing food bags…
Related posts: holiday gifts: cheap + fun/useful/cool…
role model: kevin kelly’s cool tools
11 questions to ask before buying something
keeping holiday gift-giving ‘real’: our 12 fave gifts to give
mimimalist book bar/paperweight (d-i-y or buy)
photo: sally schneider
At dinner parties these days, everybody seems to be drinking lots of water, in addition to or instead of wine. Rather than plunking a pitcher of water on the table that will undoubtedly need several refills, we’ve found another solution. We decant filtered water into great-looking wine bottles whose labels we’ve soaked off. We keep 4 or 5 of them in the fridge to have chilled water readily available. They look great on the table, and seem to make non-wine drinking guests feel like they are included in the pouring of something special.
During an ordinary day, we find them a simple, useful pleasure: chilled water to pour from a lovely vessel.
Once you start really looking at wine bottles, you’ll notice all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors, some more beautiful than others. We go for the most austerely sculptural we can find. read more…
When we first read about Appree’s leaf-shaped sticky notes, we wrote them off as just another expensive and unnecessary take on a good simple, efficient design – the Post-It. THEN we saw them used to embellish a wall – not trying to be practical ‘post-its’ but rather, tiny little leaf sculptures…
….a-h-h-h there’s a sweet idea for decorating a room. read more…
One of the very best products that Ikea has carried over the years was their plywood Frosta stool. It is a fine ripoff of the famous Alvar Aalto stool, but cost only $12 (as opposed to $300+). It is no longer available in the United States, but is available in other countries, including France, Italy, Ireland and Sweden. It was featured prominently on Ikea’s Swedish blog recently, with ideas for painting the stools in stylish way; to us that array of Frosta’s is like a pile of French macaroons we weren’t allowed to eat.
We find ourselves now treating the four Frosta stools we’ve had for years as though they were as precious as Aalto stools. They are endlessly useful as side tables and impromptu seating, and stack to store out of the way. We’ve seen many great hacks using the bent-plywood legs as shelf brackets, speaker holders etc …
We’ve written Ikea twice to ask why, what the possible logic could there be to dictate such a decision; we haven’t heard back. So we have to two ideas: read more…
We really like this novel way to store magazines by strapping stacks of them with belts; it turns them into an objet, a surprising something that is more stylish than a stack of magazines, yet serves a function. Cool-looking belts can be had cheap at second-hand and thrift stores. We wondered if the stack could go stool height without slipping around, for impromtu seating or surface. We found this iteration of the idea… read more…
Recently, we’ve been on the hunt for great lighting, that is, lighting that is cool looking and gives us the option of as much light as we want to adjust hi-or-low with a dimmer. We keep finding wonderfully designed lights with really low wattage bulbs, like 40 or 60, which rule them out. We want at least 100 watts worth.
As always when we can’t find what’s in our heads (which is surprisingly often), we look around to see if we can make it ourselves. For a while now, we’ve been a fan of lighting designer Lindsay Adelman’s free d-i-y lighting plans (there are four on her website) which give you a basic plan, parts, where to buy them, and how-to’s - information that makes it possible to improvise. A note in the You Make It section of her site says:
“Experimenting with off-the-shelf parts is how Lindsey got started before designing and manufacturing the custom system for the Bubble Series.”
We’re inspired. We’re already looking into read more…
Art Director Gustavo Vieira has created a an Is Life Good tumblr where you can download this sign in different resolutions customized for your computer, tablet or phone, to use as wallpaper FREE…
…A great, simple to-the-point question/answer/reminder.
via Swiss-Miss
Related posts: ‘replace fear of the unknown with curiosity’
gandhi: ‘our beliefs become our…destiny‘
‘what’s not wrong?’ and other ways to start your day
‘what to focus on’, reminder via marc johns
‘don’t say yes. be yes.’
A favorite way we’ve found to savor an artwork or image without owning it is simply to prop a book with the work open against a wall, on a shelf or sideboard or mantle. Every time we pass by or glance up, it is there for us to enjoy. When we tire of it, or become “blind” from seeing it frequently, we open the book to another page, or display another open book altogether.
We’ve found this is a great way to put ideas we want to remember in our field of vision…
For example, it allows us to have flowers in our place when no live ones are available or worth buying, like the begonia and sunflower, above, from Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones… read more…
youaretheriver.com
On the lookout for an inexpensive bed frame, this shipping pallet bed caught our eye. It’s got a low profile rustic-modern look, though we’re not crazy about the overhang on the sides (easy to bang your shin on). It made us start analyzing and mulling what makes a really great shipping pallet bed.
At Straphacker, we stumbled on a great roundup of shipping pallet beds that confirmed some of our ideas. read more…
We are big fans of impromptu business cards as well as interesting signs posted on public walls, or, well, anywhere. So we’re smitten with the possibilities inherent in Printery & Bindery’s compact, portable self-inking rubber stamp, with a ring to affix it to your key chain, for anywhere stamping. You could have it made up to print your essential info for instant business cards, OR design a sign you want to stamp around town…like CREATE! or JOY! or BE YES!. At $23, they’re a bargain (and a gift we’d want to get).
via Swiss-Miss
Related posts: report from tangier: 3d business cards
minimalist business cards (why not blank ones?)
business card stamp
out of work?: retrofit your business card!
our handmade business card
We’ve been so busy, we haven’t given all the gifts we’ve had in mind to give to friends and family. Our fridge is still stockpiled with mason jars of Prunes in Armagnac we plan to give friends we meet up with in the next few weeks. And our favorite gift for this year, the extraordinary book Tantra Song by Franck Andre Jamme, sold out of its first printing after we’d gotten to send only two copies out. So we’re going to wait a month or two until it’s back in stock, THEN we’ll give it as a Christmas – or anytime – gift. The book is a rare collection of powerful modernist Tantric paintings from Rajasthan, done on salvaged paper: “things of beauty used to awaken heightened states of consciousness.” The book, and the story behind it ia SO remarkable that it is a well-worth-waiting-for-bargain at around $25. (It will be available here
We’re just following our Philosophy of Late Celebrations: read more…
Although we love walking through the canyons of trees for sale on New York City streets, we haven’t been able to wrap our heads around buying and decorating a Christmas tree. Lately, we’ve seen a number of festive alt-Christmas trees made with inexpensive string Christmas lights
photo: maria robledo
With the holidays soon upon us, I thought I’d post one of my very best cookie recipes. Or perhaps I should say cookie dough recipes: in addition to being able to fashion it into all sorts of cookie shapes and flavors, it also makes a great bake-ahead tart crust. Fleur de Sel Cookies, Earl Grey Tea Cookies, Coffee Vanilla Bean Cookies, Shortbread Pastry Lids and Shells for Tarts, and Brown Sugar Lime Curd Tart are just a few of the creations it easily morphs into. Once you know the basic thinking behind it, you can improvise endlessly with it. read more…
