(Our strategy for being “on hold” is to wear an old-fashioned telephone headset - an essential tool – so we can write, scan blogs, surf…as we follow one thing to another… draw….and make cups of tea…cook. It’s not so much being “on hold” that we mind, it’s the irritating music that’s the problem. Take away the music, and it wouldn’t bother us much at all.)
(Video link here.) This inspiring TED Talk by Britta Riley recently introduced us to the world of Windowfarms. These vertical hydroponic gardens allow city-dwellers to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits in the windows of their otherwise cramped apartments, all year long. Think ‘strawberries’!
But what’s most intriguing about Windowfarms is the community behind them, constantly refining the product and experimenting with new possibilities. This isn’t a community of traditional scientists or farmers–it’s just a bunch of folks who are passionate about an idea.
Riley describes the process of what goes on at our.Windowfarms–the Windowfarms open source community platform–as “R&D-I-Y” (research-and-develop-it-yourself). read more…
On a recent Selby visit, we spotted this fabric-draped sofa in the wonderful home of Hitoshi Uchida-san – owner of J’Antiques Tokyo (check out the full story). The beauty of it is that the sofa is covered with a really big swath of fabric that can bunch and drape luxuriously. The fabric is wide enough to go from the floor in front of the sofa, over the seat, up the back and hang over by a couple of feet – not something the usual 54-inch width of fabric can do. But where do you find affordable fabric like this? read more…
Last week, we posted our best recipes for how to brine a turkey, make side dishes and freeform tarts, and some suggestions for wines to serve at the feast. If you’re having a crowd, now’s the time to figure out what to serve all this on, and where the guests will sit…
We went back into the Archive to dig out links for how to make big tables both round and rectangular, and a variety of makeshift seating options, including our favorite bench made of chairs. We’re posting it early, in case you need to stop by the lumber yard for plywood of planks.
The essential liberating rule of thumb: nothing needs to match…neither tableclothes, nor napkins, nor dishes, nor chairs…nor glasses… read more…
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…
Our post on artist Holton Rower‘s gorgeous d-i-y leather cabinet pulls has been one of our most popular in recent months, and continues to make its way around the internet. But until yesterday, we hadn’t seen someone take the idea and make it their own. Rikkianne Van Kirk’s post on Re-Nest gives a step-by-step of the drawer pulls she made for an old desk, using an old leather belt that she cut into strips…the perfect material: strong, good-looking and recycled…
BoingBoing recently posted a compelling video (below or link here) of a toupeed fellow named Augustus Gladstone giving a tour of the room he lives in in an abandoned hotel, in some unnamed city. Gladstone’s apartment is an eccentric, strangely homey place decorated with what appears to be mostly found stuff and collections of bric-a-brac. There’s some question as to the authenticity of the video but no matter. It’s really interesting either way.
What caught our eye (in addition to two old TV’s placed one on top of the other) was an ingenious shelving unit using stacks of books as bricks to hold boards. It’s clever, and in another setting, could be pretty chic. Just for the hell of it, we typed “books as bricks” into google images and found some beautiful iterations of the idea, like read more…
We found this great looking d-i-y mousepad on our friend Tara Mann’s Tumblr. We love Tara’s description of her eureka moment:
My friend Phillip recently had cork flooring put in his kitchen, and as I was shoving a cheese covered baguette down my throat, staring at the floor, I thought about how nice that material would look as a mousepad.
So I asked Phil if he had any extra cork, and he had quite a bit laying dormant in a closet. Anyways, I measured and cut the cork in squares of various sizes. They look great on desks and work really well! read more…
We are big fans of masking tape for taping up pictures, ideas, and even making designs right on the wall, as our friend Holton Rower did in a Children’s hospital in Russia; – white, black, and blue painter’s tape are our favorites. We’d forgotten about the possibilities of using brightly colored and/or patterned Japanese Washi tape for the same purposes, until we stumbled on this lovely inspiration board.
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…
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…)
After we posted Gary Chang’s 344 square foot Hong Kong apartment, we thought we’d pretty much seen the pinnacle of morphing possibilities for TINY. Until this morning, when we found ourselves riveted by this video of photographer Christian Schallert‘s 258 square foot Barcelona apartment (apx 11′ x 23′): a former pigeon loft re-envisioned by designer Barbara Appolloni. (Check out the “before” shots in the beginning!) We’ve seen this clever configuration of cubes likened to Legos, but find the image misleading. This completely built-in, every-need-and-square-inch-considered space is like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes that suddenly open to reveal hidden chambers; everything is hidden behind walls until Schallert wants to access it. It is an “action apartment”, given great charm by the stunning view and penthouse feel. read more…
Spotted in the left hand corner of this Corsican kitchen, a sink so wide and shallow that it can be used as a “wet” work surface, to wash and pare the artichokes or any other vegetable. Shallow sinks fly in the face of usual thinking of “the deeper the better”. For deep sinks make us have to bend over and work in an uncomfortable position, whether it be washing dishes or cleaning lettuce. We prefer shallowish sinks, our ideal being the custom-made one our friend Margot Wellington had made for her East Hampton kitchen, which allows her to pile dirty dishes at one end, and prep food on the other.
Faced with the possibility of camping in a kitchenless space, we’ve been thinking about ways to forge a makeshift kitchen. Lately, we’ve come across a number of kitchen islands made out of sawhorses and a slab of wood. Although they have a pleasingly ad hoc feeling, sawhorses naturally seem to possess a low-key architectural aesthetic, as witnessed by our many posts on saw horse tables (more below). Unique slabs of wood make for compelling surfaces, like this massive slab of cypress featured in a recent Dwell slideshow. read more…
Last week, we posted our best recipes for how to brine a turkey, make side dishes and freeform tarts, and some suggestions for wines to serve at the feast. If you’re having a crowd, now’s the time to figure out what to serve all this on, and where the guests will sit…
, 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?”
. 
