(Video link here.) Mike Breach never knew he was an artist, until he started working as a barrista. He discovered that the foamed milk inspired him to draw in cappucinos and lattes. The way he found his unique expression seems like kismet to us.
If you’d like to try your hand at drawing in milk froth but need a palette to begin with, we find battery-powered milk frothers make an easy way to make a thick foam. Follow Breach’s basic method, pick up a skewar or a toothpick and then…see what happens.
(We’re thinking kids could do it with a rich cup of cocoa….)
(Video link here.) We’re sometimes leary of the trend of making useful things our of ANYTHING because the object made are often so homely. We find ourselves inspired by French Designer Pierre Lota’s video introduing his video series 1 Object in 1 Minute. His assemblages of coat hangers, paper, and spoons have a strong design sense, and his videos show them to be do-able. What the video’s really do is encourage us to see visually-appealing, useful possibilities for ordinary materials and realize we could, with patience and perhaps some experimenting, do them ourselves.
One of our favorites: a spoon bent into a hook you can rest on a table to keep your handbag off the dirty floor of a restaurant, read more…
Suddenly realizing that Easter is just a couple of days away, we started thinking Easter eggs, the symbol of the day both Christian and pagan. Immediately, photographer Tessa Traeger’s egg series came to mind. All eggs collected from various birds, they provide inspiration for egg decorating from Nature. Witness Livet Hamma’s diy spatter-painted eggs below. Easy-to-do, freeform, and potentially really beautiful (with one caveat*).
If, like us, you have been slow to get your Easter act together, look below for last-minute strategies, recipes and ideas. read more…
Reclaimed shipping pallets continue to be a material that inspires design-afficionados and diy-ers alike. Over the years we’ve posted many clever iterations of pallet sofas, beds, planters, wine racks, flat files (just type “shipping pallets” into our Search box)…As well as some serious research and info on the safety of pallets, what to look for, and what to avoid. But in all our navigating of the pallet world, we’ve never seen such a blow-by-blow, here-are-the-realities of actually making a nice piece of furniture out of found pallets, UNTIL we went to the website of one of our commenters, Santiago DIY, a new blog from Santiago, Chile (in Spanish and English).
There we found the real-life steps to making a platform bed out of shipping pallets, which is not nearly as simple as finding them, arranging and putting a mattress on top. Here they are: read more…
Spotted in Design Milk’s recent story about Rua Confettora, unconventional, international design shop in Brescia, Italy: a white-painted ladder used as the support for glass shelves: instant, rustic/modern chic, made from ordinary materials.
When we hunted around, we discovered that Lab::Istanbul’s had created a line of shelving based on the idea: read more…
As a spring snow storm sweeps through the midwest, it seems fitting to post these wondrous snow paintings by artist Simon Beck along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France. He creates the beautiful geometric patterns, some as large as 3 soccer fields, by plodding through the snow in snowshoes for hours at a time. How long the transient artworks last depends on the weather, although Beck often redesigns patterns as new snow falls; sometimes a work will go unfinished. Beck’s motivation seems entirely improvisational:
The main reason for making them was because I can no longer run properly due to problems with my feet, so plodding about on level snow is the least painful way of getting exercise. Gradually, the reason has become photographing them…
Spotted on Ikea’s Swedish website LivetHemma: a bunch of cabinet boxes afixed to the wall, with space to store a bike. It’s a graphic solution to storing a bike when you have no outside bike storage, and want to get it off the floor.
Of course, bikes are beautiful hung directly on the wall, horizontally read more…
Spotted on a well-worth-checking-out riff of interiors photographed by Simon Watson‘s: a cool, clever workstation make out of simple wooden sawhorses, a hollow core door, an industrial drawer unit, and a Tolomeo lamp.
Architects SMLXL Studio seems to have a real THING for shipping pallets, which they’ve used all through a tiny two story apartment in Prague. In many cases, it seems they took they pallets apart and reconfigured their components: thick blocks and slats to custom make furniture the exact size they wanted. Pallet has clearly become aesthetic… read more…
In the small country of Burkina Faso near the border to Ghana, it is common for dwellings to be painted with intricate patterns using colored mud and chalk. The patterns tells stories of the community’s culture.
We are amazed at how modern these rustic wall paintings are, and imagine how beautiful they would be adorning the side of a building or a garden wall, a floor, a headboard perhaps.
Just as we were finishing our post about LED illuminating tree trunks, we found this image of a thick tree trunk table/stool where vivid red paint was used to draw attention to the split in the wood. It was also stenciled.
More possibilities from the tree trunk logs we hauled home after Hurricane Sandy.
We’ve just been mulling a wall in a bedroom that has an unfinished doorway, currently covered by a curtain. On the wall next to we temporarily propped a big mirror that gives great depth to the room and a bit of the view of the park across the way. The question: how to combine the mirror and a door with a minimal footprint (i.e. it doesn’t open into the smallish room.) We found an interesting solution at Desire to Inspire. Although we’re not crazy about the drab gray room itself, we like the idea of big sliding mirror that can act as a door when necessary. read more…
Spotted in a the cube room, a concept room created by designer Fabian Gatermann for a design hostel in Cologne, Germany: a fab shipping pallet bed painted like one of Piet Mondrian‘s famous “Compositions” from 20′s and 30′s.
On close inspection, it appears that the bed was made to LOOK like it was made of pallets; it seems a bit too perfectly made, its wood a bit too smooth to be from real pallets.
Nevertheless, pallets provide great inspiration, and clever use of paint can take pallet furniture to a new level… read more…
We love the possibilities inherent in the great valentine DIY we found at Mineco Co UK, made of woven paper. All you need is an exactto knife and straight edge and some nice paper. Mineco’s site tells how-to, but there’s lots of room for improvising (were thinking cut up photographs, magazines, ribbon…)
