We’ve long been fans of unhemmed linen tableclothes, napkins, shower curtains – a rectangle of pure linen just ripped to leave a raw edge *. We hadn’t though of this swell embellishment: the yarn stitching accentuates the intentionality of NOT-HEMMED in a really beautiful and charming way. read more…
photo: anthony giglio
Our friend and resident oenophile Anthony Giglio snapped this picture of a rather bold and desperate masking tape repair. We see it as a fine example of what we are frequently told is the powerful effect of reading ‘the improvised life’ daily: gradually you’re vision changes. You not only ‘see’ and delight in found improvisations around you, but you also find yourself improvising solutions to all sorts of dilemmas.
Who needs an auto body shop?
This crazy repair eminded us of There I Fixed It, a blog chock full of desperate, uninhibited and sometimes brilliant fixes.
Related posts: ‘window box’ car bumper
the beauty of black masking tape
d-i-y “masked” painted tables
japanese masking tape in cool colors +patterns
swarm studios for antropologie
We’ve written about painting chair and table legs, and we’ve written about pink but we’ve never considered putting the two ideas together…until we came across this image of just one leg of a chair painted pink. It’s a lovely visual surprise that makes an old chair looks like it’s dressed to-the-nines.
Although in reality, every leg of this table is painted pink, this picture got us imagining how just one leg or even two legs painted would look: much better to our eye. read more…
photo: andrea raisfled
After reading our post about how to design your own textiles, our friend Andrea Raisfeld sent us this doodle by her daughter Maxie: “I thought it would make a great fabric design.” We’d love to find some fabric like this… Another great example of where your designs for on-demand textiles can come from.
Related posts: copy this: paint a pillow…sofa…bedspread…curtain…
sewing advice for beginners
copy this: “moderne” patchwork tablecloth
painted fabric redux: clothes!
We’ve long loved Dutch architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld’s elegant, elemental, iconic wood furniture. When we read that there was a book of his built-it-yourself furniture designs, we were thrilled….until we discovered that it cost $145 new and $78 used at Amazon. Darn. (Curious, a few days later we found that it IS available on Amazon
So we went on a hunt. And found it! How to Construct Rietveld Furniture is available for $39.95 at Tools for Woodworking. Here’s its enticing description:
Rietveld’s furniture is really easy to make. The joinery is well within the skill of even a rank beginner, and you come out with world class 20th century furniture…The designs range from his famous chairs to tables, stools, a magnificent sideboard, a few pieces scaled for children, and some lamps from his more architectural work. read more…
Early this morning we received an email from a friend who was about to make chocolate truffles for her Valentine, and wasn’t sure how to transport them. The email was sent in the wee hours of the morning, and we realized that for many, today means a last-minute scramble to get ready for Valentine’s day – TOMORROW. So here are some suggestions we’ve found in our morning surfing, or that we include in our personal arsenal.
We love the cut-and-fold d-i-y cards Made by Joel came up with. They are meant as a kid’s project but we think they’d make a swell grownup valentine: the template ever-inventive Joel Henriques generously included as a pdf has an appealing abstract look that is great unto itself… read more…
photo: Virginia Del Giudice
Valentine’s Day is next week, which leaves us thinking about gifts that break the chocolate-and-flowers mold. We were suddenly reminded of an email we received from Virginia Del Giudice, a reader in Argentina, who used my simple Lemon Olive Oil recipe from A New Way to Cook
Virginia went the extra mile and made beautiful labels for the bottles:
“I designed the labels with my computer and printed at home on a thin green paper I kept a long time in a drawer. It had some wrinkles but I found that nice and didn’t want to correct it! It has a feeling of old times. In small text I wrote your suggestions for usage.”
Virginia was kind enough to share her labels, which you can find here. They’re in Spanish, but you can always fill in your own English text (or keep the Spanish, which is lovely and adds some flair). I was thinking that all dressed up like this, this oil would make a lovely untraditional Valentine’s Day gift for someone who loves to cook. Chocolate is always great, but who doesn’t love something a little different. read more…
photo: marc raboy
One of the most inspiring D-I-Y books we know of is from the 70′s, with illustrations in black-and-white. It is Spiros Zakas’ More Furniture in 24 Hours, a book of plans for making simple, sculptural, practical pieces of furniture FAST, like this folding screen made of hollow-core doors and piano hinges. Unlike most hinged doors, this one doesn’t have to zig-zag to stand up…it can even be configured in a circle.
The book is chock full of ideas, which, if you don’t actually do them, will lodge in your mind as a possible solution or way to improvise your own creations, as a kind of liberation. Writes Zakas:
Making thing is an art, whether it is baking bread, sewing a quilt, or building a table. It is self-expression, a way of knowing what we like and how we like it, of discovering who we are. The interesting thing I have found is that everyone is creative in many ways if he or she will only try them. Just because you have neer done something doesn’t mean that you can’t. read more…
via modernthread.blogspot.com
We love the way the internet can increase people’s ability to design and fabricate things that have traditionally been the realm of professional designers and manufacturers. Our newest favorite online resource/service is digital fabric printing. Over the past three or four years, a number of online textile printers have popped up, including Spoonflower, Karma Kraft, and Fabric on Demand. While each site differs slightly in what they offer and how they work with you, the general principal remains the same: you pick a pattern or design your own, upload it to the site and select your fabric type and reference colors; then wait for your fabric (or practice swatch) to arrive at your front door.
As always, part of the trick is deciding which service to try. Luckily, Kim at TrueUp did the leg-work for us in 2009, printing the same design with four different companies. (One of them, Eye Candey, doesn’t seem to exist anymore). Her experience is extremely helpful, and includes tips about what file type and image resolution to use, as well as the differences in pigment type and the importance of color-correcting. She also created this handy comparison pdf (updated in March 2010) so you can see the differences between each printer.
If you’ve ever wanted to design your own textiles, it doesn’t get much easier than this. Need some ideas for patterns? We find them everywhere, read more…
Studio 360 recently aired a story about garage inventors; people who are innovating, pushing the boundaries of science, and creating without government funding or hi-tech labs. Garage inventors tend to be really smart and really tenacious; sometimes they come up with incredibly useful-to-the-world inventions, like William Kamkwamba who created electricity-generating windmills out of scrap parts in his poor African village; sometimes the inventions are the focus of a personal passion that not everybody sees as useful, from submarines-built-for-one to Miroslav Tichy‘s brilliant homemade cameras (above), created out of need and the belief that “you have to have a bad camera” to make compelling photos. But we’re most interested in the mindset that makes a person a self-propelled inventor. We especially liked this example:
Rachel Zimmerman works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, but she was an amateur inventor first. In seventh grade she created the Bliss Symbol printer, which allowed people with cerebral palsy to communicate quickly. “The nice thing about being 12 years old is that nobody is telling you what you can and can’t do.”
Practicing thinking like a kid is clearly one of the keys to innovative thinking. If you forget what you’ve been told you can or cannot do, the world opens up. Suddenly, there are more possibilities…
We’ve discovered that many of our readers have the “garage inventor’ mentality (whether they have a garage or not). They practice thinking outside-the-box to devise solutions to everyday problems. read more…
photo: mirja/koulun lattia narisee
There’s a lot we love about this whimsically d-i-y decorated storage cabinet:
The torquoise and yellow legs… read more…
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
Just before Christmas, I posted my best-ever butter cookie recipe: Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies, along with many variations. The versatile cookie dough recently inspired yet another improvisation on the basic theme. Actually, it’s an improvisation on my Tuscan Herb Salt Recipe, that I then used on the butter cookies, to make a double-improvisation: Brown Sugar Butter Cookies with Thyme-Rosemary-Lavender Salt…
I used the essential Herb Salt method to make a fragrant salt using classic Herbes de Provence: rosemary, thyme and lavender (instead of the usual garlic, rosemary and sage). After I cut out the raw cooky dough, I sprinkled each disk with some of the aromatic salt, hoping that the combination would make for a subtle, surprising and delicious cookie. It did, and has become a new favorite.
That’s what happens when you start improvising: one idea links and layers with another, until you have improvisations made of improvisations…
The basic method is simple… read more…
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…
photo: maria robledo
For all the wonderful ice creams that are commercially available, I find myself turning to a simple approach I devised years ago for whipping up vividly-flavored tropical fruit ice creams with much less cream and sugar than usual. When pureed, ripe bananas, papayas and/or mangos achieve the creamy silky texture that quantities of cream and egg yolks normally achieve. The resulting faux ice cream reminds me of the tropical-flavored ice creams I’ve bought from stands in Chinatown or when traveling in Mexico. They make a great antidote to winter blues as well as a fine midnight snack.
The method is simple: read more…
