projects + play
Wary Meyers
Wary Meyers has the BEST eye for flea market finds. Dig this giant set of colorful interlocking building blocks he posted on his site. They have no known provenance. Says Wary:
They could be old, could be new.
My guess is this was an old collaboration between Josef Albers and Donald Judd.
and Bill Ding.
We can’t tell their size from the photos but imagine them – would LOVE them – to be about one foot long each, so they could interlock into chic stools, side tables, shelves and other usable structures, for kids or adults. Looking at a bird’s eye view, you can imagine read more…
06.16.11 |
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in copy this!, d-i-y, kids, projects + play, reimagine |
Over the past few months, ‘the improvised life’ has been contacted by some very interesting folks who are implementing our ideas into their work. Leslie Koch, President of the Trust for Governor’s Island regularly sends our posts to her staff to spark ideas for the island’s programming. The island is home to a number of projects that embody ‘the improvised life’…Etsy artisans, impromptu games, artist studios; it’s a unique canvas for out-of-the-box projects, art and happenings. We’ll be heading there in a couple of weeks to check it out.
Meanwhile, Andy Didorosi, an entrepeneur in Detroit has been renovating Paper Street, his 22,000 sq/ft small business incubator, using ideas he culled from ‘the improvised life’. We’ve been discussing about designing something special for the space.
And just recently, our good friend Ana invited us to blog AND help with the renovation of the 900 square-foot, full-of-potential-and-in-need-of-work apartment she bought in Harlem. She has big ideas and is working under a really tight budget, just the constraints we love. She envisions it being something of a laboratory for ‘improvised life’ principles and ideas, and we’re thrilled. There’ll be lots of Before/In Process/and Afters. Stay tuned!
What would you do if you had an island as a canvas? An industrial space?…An apartment?…
06.15.11 |
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in community, inside, outside, paths + processes, projects + play, strategies |
?
Our minds are boggled by the twenty-five wondrously imaginative entrees we got for our Mystery Tree Contest…“prototyping to the sky”…”a fitting room for very chic lumberjacks” …”infrastructure articulated”…YIKES!
We were so hard-pressed to pick a winner, we ran it through random.org. The winning entry contains some interesting philosophical underpinnings (totally in line with ‘the improvised life’)….
“See as it’s being built by a bunch of guys, and there are half a dozen empty booze barrels scattered about, I’m betting even they don’t know what they’re building …not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Congratulations Brian! You’ve just won an inscribed copy of The Improvisational Cook
.
Here are all the comments compiled on one place; they are really fun to read with the Mystery Tree in your sightlines, or in mind: read more…
06.14.11 |
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in community, outside, projects + play |
Studio 360
Driving around the web recently, we found two swell free diversions for this weekend.
Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has created a digital National Jukebox from their archives of songs released by the Victor Talking Machine Company (between 1901 and 1925 (with the promise of more to come). Genres range widely 0pera, blues, yodeling, jazz, and include some extremely rare recordings, like Enrico Caruso singing Serenata (below), one of many from the great singer. read more…
06.10.11 |
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in cheap + great, family + friends, free + flea, inspiration blogs + sites, music, projects + play, resources |
Dominic Wilcox
We are completely smitten with Variations on Normal, Dominic Wilcox’s blog about his inventions and simple,”out there” solutions to everyday needs and wants. Wilcox is a self-described “artist, designer, inventor and ‘thinkeruper’ who works within the territory of the ‘everyday’.” That’s our favorite territory.
Each of Wilcox’s concepts and inventions is annotated. To make his room more welcoming, he carpeted it with Welcome mats. “You can even wipe your feet wherever you want. Oh and there is a patch of floor where the door mat should be.”
“ …to avoid the squeezing at wrong end arguments” he invented Two WayToothpaste, with a cap on each end.
Wilcox has gained some notoriety of late for his phallic and practical Finger-nose stylus for touchscreen technology… read more…
06.01.11 |
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in inspiration blogs + sites, people, projects + play, reimagine, solutions, strategies, why not? |
One of our new favorite food sites is They Draw and Cook, where every recipe is illustrated, for totally appealing, graphical how-to’s. Some are done by professionals, and some are done by amateurs who submit their work to the site, but all are charming and one-of-a-kind. Somehow, having the recipes in this form loosens up the vibe into a more improvisational one. And it makes us want to DRAW what we cook, rather than just write a recipe.
You can search for recipes by ingredient, meal type, illustration style or even where in the world the artist is from, OR use the fun Dial-a-Dinner option for a great random menu…. read more…
05.24.11 |
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in family + friends, food, projects + play, recipes, resources blogs + sites, resources books + zines |
We’ve gotten a little lazy of late, since we dislike going to the gym (yellow walls with black floors under florescent lights) and we spend so many long hours at our desks. We could get stymied by our slide into laziness by comparing ourselves to all those buff self-disciplined people that faithfully climb onto the treadmill at the crack of dawn. Instead, we took a cue from this New Yorker cartoon, and decided to improvise a workout for ourselves at home, to just START with something simple, and work up: a bit every day. We figure doing something is better than doing nothing. And who says we have to work out a gym: the right way is what’s right for us.
A trainer we know has been showing us exercises we can do at home, with no special equipment, using chairs, walls, floor, steps. (We’re planning to write a post about it, once we know more.) We’re amazed at what we can do at home IF we just get off our butts and start.
Which we did, today…doing a few reps of light weights, some squats and some wall push-ups, after we’ve warmed up with skipping-rope-without-a-rope. We’re going to try to build working out INTO our workday, read more…
05.23.11 |
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in d-i-y, health, how-to, music, paths + processes, projects + play, resources blogs + sites, strategies, video |
A friend called us recently to ask our thoughts on containers for planting her 10′x5′balcony in New York City. She wanted to have her plantings along one side of the terrace only, to leave the rest of the space clear to see the view and do tai chi. Attuned we started spotting some nice looking rectangular and square containers in catalogues. AND we stumbled on Fern Richardson’s charming blog Life on the Balcony, which addresses the many balcony garden related issues, from how to reduce noise, to how to make a screen between you and ugly sightlines. We love her great how-to on turning a shipping pallet into a vertical container. It’s one of the few vertical gardens that’s appealed to us visually; we instantly wondered about painting or staining the wood really dark to chic-it-up a bit*. Anyway, the gist seems easy and doable… read more…
05.11.11 |
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in garden, how-to, outside, projects + play, reclaim, resources, resources blogs + sites |
Ambatalia
Easter is next Sunday, and we’re planning on dyeing Easter Eggs, the holiday’s totally fun, messy activity that invariably yields charming results. Eggs become our blank canvas on which to improvise all sorts of gorgeous colors and designs. We love Ambatalia’s post on making your own plant-derived egg dyes out of ordinary foods, like onion skin for sienna and orange; turmeric for deep golds and pale yellows; blueberries or red cabbage for blues; coffee for browns. We’ve found that beets give lovely shades of pink and red. You can layer the dying process to mix colors: red cabbage dye followed by grape for purple…turmeric followed by red cabbage for lavender.
Ambatalia’s Molly de Vries found the simple directions on Squidoo (via Martha Stewart Living). Basically you just chop up the food, and boil it with some white vinegar read more…
04.19.11 |
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in celebrations, copy this!, family + friends, food, how-to, kids, materials, projects + play, recipes, resources, resources blogs + sites |
Although we’ve always thought of ourselves as rather minimalist, we’ve been realizing that we have attachments to things that we don’t really want or need anymore, and have a hard time letting them go. What we are really attached to are the memories and associations the object spurs, afraid we’d lose the memory if we could never see the object again. As a solution, we started photographing things we wanted to let go of to create a digital archive of “Memory Stuff”. It freed us up to give stuff away.
Now we have a photo to remind us the tiny blue-gray pebbles we collected as we sat for hours on a beach near San Francisco talking to a friend many years ago…We don’t need to write anything down, because the memories are within us, called up instantly.
We discovered a variation of this strategy in a recent SwissMiss post called Eulogy of Stuff; it quoted a Comment left on an Apartment Therapy thread by a reader named slocumnavigator: read more…
04.06.11 |
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in copy this!, how-to, paths + processes, projects + play, resources, storage, tools |
We’ve just returned from a visit to Helvetia, West Virginia where two dear friends had passed away within a couple of weeks of each other. Both lived long amazingly rich lives that touched a great many people. We came home tired, thoughtful, amazed, sad, inspired…and slowly started back to work on ‘the improvised life’. As often happens, we stumbled on something that resonated deeply with what we’d been thinking about: Candy Chang’s public art project Before I Die. Chang found a derelict building in New Orleans, painted its sides with chalkboard paint and stenciled the question “Before I die I want to____________” ; she left spaces for people to fill in with chalk. Says Chang:
“It’s a question that has changed me in the last year, and I believe the design of our public spaces can better reflect what’s important to us as residents and as human beings. The responses and stories from passersby while we were installing it have already hit me hard in the heart.” read more…
04.04.11 |
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in art, buildings, community, family + friends, identity, inspiration blogs + sites, outside, paths + processes, projects + play |
We been KNOCKED OUT by the responses we’ve gotten to our teeny, easy contest to win a free, inscribed copy of Sally’s The Improvisational Cook. Check out the Comments following last week’s bookgivaway announcement to read some of the great, imaginative improvs reader’s have done in the kitchen. The deadline for entry is Thursday, April 14th, so you’ve got a couple of weeks to mull and create.
You can “look inside” The Improvisational Cook on Amazon or go to Sally’s website to read reviews and how it came about. “Schneider gives cooks the know-how to embellish, adapt, change, alter, modify and experiment in their cooking with plenty of encouragement and helpful information. Here are the tools and insights everyone needs to find his or own voice in the kitchen…”
For a recap on how to enter (it’s easy!), a few rules AND to read the great entries that have been submitted so far, click here.
We hope to read your kitchen adventures.
03.30.11 |
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in community, food, gifts, paths + processes, projects + play, recipes, resources books + zines, strategies |
which measures 21″ x 16″. Imagine IT with flip-down legs… 
