Harriet Bell alerted us to this beautiful candy wrapper chair and the story of how she found it…one thing leading to another in the course of a few minutes:
Our friend Peter Davis just returned from San Miguel de Allende; knowing that I love handbags made from Mexican candy wrappers, he brought me three! One candy wrapper in the bags looked weird, so we started poking around the web to identify it. And we found this amazing candy wrapper chair.Thought you’d get an improvised kick out of it.
The gorgeous chair designed by Mexican designer Emiliano Godoy takes a very old and simple idea – weaving candy wrappers (which we remember doing as kids) into a strong “textile”, and EXPANDS it, literally. The large size squares and monochrome palette gives it a definite chic. We found a step-by-step how-to here, and a video (below). We’re imagining scaling up the method to larger sheets of whatever cool paper-like material we find (magazines, high-end paper shopping bags…?…It might even be done with leather or some of the out-there synthetic materials you can find at fabric and art stores these days. You can drap and stitch it…Think of the possibilities for using this strong geometric weaving as furniture covering (of an ordinary wooden Ikea chair, perhaps), rug, tablecloth, satchel, room screen!!!!???
Our friend Ellen Silverman traveled twice to Cuba in the past year, and came back with some amazing photographs of daily life there, in particular the kitchens of families she met. They are invariably improvised, deeply makeshift spaces, reflecting extremely limited resources coupled with extraordinary resourcefulness and spirit. Ellen’s images tell the story. read more…
Pamela Hovland, who always has her eyes WIDE OPEN to what is around her, sent us this photo from a recent trip to Minnesota: an old swing set repurposed into a hanging garden. Charming and great! (And there’s still one swing to swing on, whenever/whoever feels like it…)
Stuart Mason Dambrot, ‘the improvised life’s resident concilientist|futurist has sent us many wonderful ideas since our first syncronous meeting on a New York City street corner. The latest, the work of designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, inventor of the Toast Spoons we recently blogged as well as Found, an oddly stylish stool put together from scraps found in a carpenter’s workshop. “Depending on which business and which projects they are working on, the waste will always be different and one stool will never look the same as the other; each item is unique.” read more…
One of our favorite mindgames is to think about what we can do without, or perhaps better put: What do we really need? We started doing it rigorously in the kitchen when we had to downsize years ago, and began to ask ourselves,”What equipment is truly necessary for the way we cook”. Not only did we discover that we did NOT need the wealth of gadgets being touted as essential, but we didn’t even need some things that people take for granted, like an electric toaster. In our smaller space, we saw an electric toaster as a space glutton that we didn’t want on our counter. About the same time, we came across an inexpensive stovetop fish grill in a Japanese kitchenware store. Hmm, we thought, wonder if we could toast bread on this? It worked wonderfully and we’ve been using it to grill our bread on a burner ever since…(sometimes we put the buttered toast back on it to melt…)
When Consilientist | Futurist Stuart Dambrot alerted us to Norwegian designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen’s toast spoons, we were totally smitten. We envisioned them brushed with olive oil and a cut clove of garlic, to eat our soup/stew/eggs with. Then we realized that they were part of a bigger study, of the idea that “Like the fascintating species of nature are a result of biological evolution, our everyday products are results of an artificial evolution; both are the results of optimization of hereditary characteristics from generation to generation.”
Feeling that the spoon had come to the end of its evolution, having hardly changed for hundreds of years (except in its decoration), Wilhelmsen set about to explore its evolutionary possibilities, adding into the mix ‘different ways of human eating’ (necessity just about always being the mother of invention). The experiment came up with some “interesting spin-offs, read more…
We’ve always loved this scene from A Day at the Races, when Harpo and Chico buy themselves some time while being chased by the chic hotel’s security. The astonishing, hilarious and beautiful 4-or-so minutes start at the 2:30 mark. If you’re pressed for time, we recommending letting the video load until you can move the cursor there, when Harpo takes over, in sublime improvisational mode, to watch a true artist at work.
“When life hands you lemons (a piano and a bunch of cops), make……………..!”
(Short version, without Harpo’s sweet riff, here.)
We were interested to see Ikea’s blog Livet Hemma‘s recent take on an idea we posted months ago: clipping boxes together with big binder clips to make somewhat freeform and sculptural shelving. We looked at their iteration of the idea, wondering if they’d seen our post, or if they’d just thought it up themselves. We were reminded of the startling way that an idea can shoot up like spring crocuses in many places at once, as though it were in the air. And that part of the nature of creating things is culling ideas that already exist and tailoring them to suit your own vision. To quote film maker Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonated with inspiration or fuels your imagination…” (Check out the full quote in the previous post.) The Ikea shelves are a great example.
What ideas would we steal from Ikea’s version of clipped-together shelves (that they may have stolen from us)? What would we change? read more…
Charles McFarlane, a Junior at the Rudolf Steiner school, is an avid scholar of 20th Century American social and military history. He recently sent us images he’s collected from his research that he thought would resonate with ‘the improvised life’. In an email he wrote:
“Necessity is often the mother of invention. This is no more apparent than in the situation of war. War is often said to be 90% boredom and 10% sheer terror. During the long stretches of boredom soldiers have often tried to improve their situations, to make their lives more bearable.
…In my study of historical photographs I am constantly on the look out for the odd and strange things in history that make you think “what was that person’s train of thought?” I think you can see that in the photos I sent you.” read more…
…being a vertically-challenged Italian-American with extra-tall kitchen cabinets, I keep a step-stool at the ready for a quick boost. This week while trying to pack lunch boxes for Sofia and Marco I couldn’t find my white, plastic step-up, and calls out to the family yielded not a single response. Then I found Marco organizing beads. Reaching into a huge jar filled with thousands of colored beads he was sorting them by color into separate compartments, by way of dropping each one into a grid on the underside of my inverted step stool. I had no idea these “compartments” were even there! How did he find them? Brilliant discovery and improv. But now I need a new stool! read more…
Years ago at a tag sale, we bought some ancient flower frogs, tiny spiked metal stands meant to hold flowers in a graceful arrangement. They are weighted so they won’t tip over. We never used them for flower arranging; instead we stuck pictures in them, for an impromptu, instantly changeable display.
We’ve had them on our list of things to photograph for ‘the improvised life’ and then stumbled on this image at the Etsy store of the wonderful blog French by Design. There, proprietor/blogger Si offers vintage treasures that she’s found. She has one lovely flower frog for sale, and some great ideas for using them: “as name cards for my formal table when we have guests… You can also collect them and use them as wedding centerpieces or to hold special photos.” read more…
Pamela Hovland sent us this email after the blizzard that hit the East Coast last week:
“I went to my local FedEx/Kinkos last night and saw this post-it note masterpiece on the wall behind the counter. My friend, who helps me with various service bureau needs there, had created a portrait of the Simpsons the day earlier, during the big snow storm. He said he was totally bored that day as all the local businesses were closed and the store had no customers. He came up with the inspired idea to MAKE SOMETHING with found materials – a plethora of colored post-it notes at his disposal. Voila!
My friend said that although he suspected FedEx/Kinko’s marketing executives may not approve of his personal artistic expression compromising the corporate brand, his local customers were loving it.”
The improvised life is about making and doing with what is at hand…. read more…
We’ve written a number of times about the gifts our neighbor Matthew Sporzynski occasionally leaves outside our door. They always come with perfect timing for whatever is going on in our lives, and are always wonderfully presented.
Like this one. Matthew called to say “I made an experimental mac-and-cheese. Would you like to try it?”
YES!
Outside our door we found a chic black Prada box…and inside of that an oddly sculptural block of foil, with the mac-and -cheese inside.
Delicious.
Now the Prada box is waiting to hold a gift we’ll give to another friend, as we recycle the fab box once again…as we did with this Hermes box… read more…
A quick glance of these paired photos on Emma’s blog made us unconsciously splice the two ideas together: ‘salvaged wood bedside or sofa side table’, we thought…fine idea. There is so much great salvaged wood around these days, that can be easily cut and stacked askew to great effect…
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