copy this!
Over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, we found a how-to for a swell group Halloween costume: a traveling exhibition of modern art… Here, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, and Jackson Pollock are represented because…
“… the best choices are iconic artists whose distinctive styles may be recognizable even in third-rate attempts (like ours) to mimic their styles.”
The only tweak we’d make to the concept is to wear some sort of face mask, which is much of the pleasure of Halloween: being anonymous…or someone/something other than yourself.
They suggest other alternatives to making a copy of a painting on a piece of canvas. Our favorite: “Have everyone dress up with a blank canvas and carry colored ink squirt guns.”
COLORED INK SQUIRT GUNS?!!!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a trove of Halloween d-i-y costume, decor, and fun, including bat wings made from broken umbrellas…
Related posts: happy halloween!!!!! (2010)
happy halloween!!! (2009)
halloween inspiration: cardboard box as the empire state building
10.31.11 |
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in apparel, art, celebrations, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, resources blogs + sites |
This photo entitled simply “Curious Photo” (from the George Eastman House collection), reminded us of the many possibilities for wearing clothes backwards. We remembered a chic woman we knew that used to wear ordinary cardigans backwards, turning them into a something ELSE…
…then we thought: Ohhh, THAT’S what we can try with an Issy Miyake shirt out made out of unbelievable fabric that doesn’t seem to work as a button-down anymore. We put in on backwards, and voila: a strangely beautiful drape to the collar now worn in front.
Wearing clothes backwards can be something to try before getting rid of a piece of clothing that no longer seems to fit. It’s a reason we love Rick Owen’s clothes; sweaters are meant to be worn backwards, frontwards, upside down…a strange liberation.
We went on the hunt for some images. Our favorite: read more…
10.24.11 |
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in apparel, copy this!, identity, reclaim |
6ac6g by holton rower
Our favorite painting of late is Holton Rower’s ’6ac6g’, which, for a blessed few weeks was right around the corner from us at Pace Gallery. It caused quite a stir and has recently been written about in Art and Antiques with good reason; it is BEAUTIFUL.
We walked over several times to visit ’6ac6g’ – happy to hang out with it in person. We’d stand back to kind of bask in it, then walk up close to look at the complex layers and swirls of color that seemed to pool onto the floor.
Since we can’t afford to BUY the huge, wondrous painting (and even if we could, it wouldn’t fit in our space), we took a picture, and now wake up to it every morning on our computer screen – it’s our screensaver. It brings to mind the feeling we had standing in front of the real thing. Awesome.
Though we are great believers in EXPERIENCING art first hand, read more…
10.19.11 |
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in art, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, people |
We’ve done several posts about Pasti-Dip over the years; it’s a paint-like substance you can dip an object into to give it a sealed, rubbery surface. We’ve seen tools plasti-dipped to make them more grippable, and flea-market cutlery to give it a modernist chic, even bookshelves coated in rubber paint via the great Max Lamb. We hadn’t imagined how useful it could be to dip the bottom third of a basket until we found this picture on 2 or 3 Things I know. It turns out IT came from a how-to posted on marthastewart.com about dipping baskets in paint…We’d just assumed they used PlastiDip, which would give the baskets a pleasing graphic element, seal their cracks and holes from small bits falling out, and fortify the weaving.
We like this Plasti-dip Rubber Coating Kit
that comes with 5 tinting colors to play around with.
Related posts: max lamb wants you to know how he does it so you can too
cool material: rubber paint (+ oscar diaz’ strap bag)
d-i-y masked painted table
more pascal anson: re-imagined silverware
10.13.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, how-to, materials, resources |
photo: ch'ng kiah kiean 莊 嘉強's photostream/flickr
One of our readers, Pippin, recently sent in us a photo she’d found on flickr, with the following message:
“someday (someday) i’m going to put canvas on a wall as wall paper, and then just paint stuff on it—layer after layer. an experimental wall.”
We love the idea of an experimental wall whether it be a sheet of canvas, heavy paper, fabric, sheetrock, whatever: a blank space to layer ideas – experiment – without any constraints on the outcome. read more…
10.12.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, paths + processes, projects + play, sightings, walls + windows |
photo: Terry Bordenave
We’ve long been a fan of using the flowers and seed pods of farmer’s market vegetables and herbs for our flower arrangements. But we hadn’t thought of dill weed flowers until Terry Bordenave sent us an email:
We subscribe to a new, small CSA in northern Vermont (Deep Earth Farm) and in one of our weekly baskets of produce, Josh & Isaac included a bunch of dill weed. After stripping off the leaves to use in a meal or two, I was left with these striking seed heads. They reminded me of fireworks bursting – I’m a big fan of them and my husband is a member of the Pyrotechnics Guild of America and puts on amazing displays for our family – and I wanted to use them at the table somehow. This is what I came up with. I left them in these old medicine bottles for about a month, and they began to dry up and curl a bit. Before I tossed them on our compost pile, I saved some of their seeds for next year’s garden.
It reminds us of all the great “weeds” that can be flowers, with a slight shift of view.
Thanks Terry!
Related posts: improv flower arrangement: pond in a vase
vase-less flower arrangement (right on the table)
alt flower arrangement: a little vase of herbs
impromptu fall flowers
10.12.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, elements, inside, nature, outside, resources |
Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times
As we were writing about Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent, Cara de Silva sent us a compelling and very timely story she spotted in the New York Times. “Back to the Land, Reluctantly” by Susan Gregory Thomas
, is about how the 42 year-old Brooklyn mother of three, having found herself divorced, flat-broke, with a dwindling livelihood, figured out how to “live off the land” from her urban garden and kitchen. “Luckily, my late father hammered into me that grit was more important than talent…I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?”
It was survival, not any particular love of artisan cheese or the notion of self-sufficiency, that motivated her to learn how to raise chickens, grow vegetables and herbs, make her own granola, bread, perfume and cleaning products, harvest edible weeds, and stretch a single piece of cheap meat into a week’s worth of dinners, until she discovered she could and her family could live on $100 a week.
IT is a lot of work. You have to be organized and able to improvise on your feet. But, frankly, it’s awesome. read more…
10.11.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, family + friends, how-to, outside, paths + processes, people, recipes, reimagine, resources, resources blogs + sites, solutions, strategies |
Dutch Interior magazine VT Wonen recently commissioned stylist Frans Uyterlinden to create interesting ‘show house’ using an eclectic mix of materials. (Check out a preview at VosgesParis). Our favorite bit: a bench/sideboard made by lashing together recycled boards. We see big possibilities in this idea… read more…
10.06.11 |
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in cheap + great, cool spaces, copy this!, d-i-y, elements, how-to, inside, materials, reclaim, resources, tools |
photo: sally schneider
Walking around the Meatpacking District a while back, we spotted this weirdly beautiful door to an under-construction building: rough, completely utilitarian, cheap (actually warped) plywood painted silver -possibly using the silvery paint meant to seal metal. It’s one of those surprise transformations of an ordinary material that we find both heartening and thought-provoking (and why we love walking around New York)… read more…
10.05.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, materials, outside, reimagine, resources, sightings |
Yesterday we stumbled on this beautiful image of decoupage scanned from the 1948 Modeles de Decoupages, les Albums du Pere Castor. It was part of a series of cheap children’s books published by Flammarian. We thought: wouldn’t that make a swell virtual ‘flower arrangement’ to send someone via email…just to say hi or wish them an immediate, special greeting. So we emailed it to our friend Suzanne Shaker, whose birthday it is today, a virtual HAPPY BIRTHDAY that we will follow by a REAL celebration and gift (since we’re of a mind that you should celebrate your birthday for MONTHS after the fact, in many ways, with many friends…)
Then we found this wonderful birthday cake from another of the Pere Castor series, and sent it to our friend
Tom Fallon, to wish him HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
read more…
09.29.11 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, family + friends, resources |
