We love this imperfect round of chalkboard painted on a wall. It made us think “Oh yeah….why not paint chalkboard paint in odd or organic freeform shapes on the wall, instead of the usual rectangle? Or perhaps a long thing strip/stripe across a whole wall….
You can buy chalkboard paint here
via Style Files
Related post: good idea: chalkboard panel as disguise
grown-up chalkboard “art”
jars with chalkboard labels to buy or d-i-y
Anne Herbert of Peace and Love and Noticing the Details is great at overhearing perfect snippets of conversation as she wanders around her city. Here are two recent favorites:
“It’s a super-duper-duper long shot, but I got nothing else to do, so why not?”
…
“No, if I make it, we both make it. You’ve got to look at it that way.” read more…
Dirty Bils Interiors/Etsy
The other day we stumbled on some oddly wonderful, sculptural bookshelves made of black pipe. They’re for sale at DirtyBils shop on Etsy for $79, a fine deal, we’d say. But as we looked closely at the pictures (below) we couldn’t help thinking “Why not monkey around with this great idea”, and started searching for resources.
We not only found a source for gorgeous black pipes and fittings... read more…
The Fun Theory is a website dedicated to the idea that “something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different…”
It issued a challenge, inviting the public to submit ideas for the best way to make good-for-us things – like throwing trash in the bin, or recycling glass bottles - fun. Check out the videos of General Entrees and Finalistst, which include a Diet Elevator and a Future Ex-Smoking Helper. Our favorite: this video illustrating how to make walking up stairs more fun than taking the escalator: make the stairs into a giant piano!
There’s even a Pinball Exercise Machine, though we don’t think it’s quite as much fun as Fred Astaire’s Fab Gym Workout (posted last week).
With heartfelt thanks to Andrea Raisfeld.
Wary Meyers
The endlessly clever Wary Meyers, designer and author of Wary Meyers’ Tossed & Found: Unconventional Design from Cast-offs
Why not do-it-ourselves? We’ve been seeing painted upholstery all over the place (see below), and then remembered that we’d written a post about fabric paint some time ago. This takes the idea a step further, using acrylic paint, which comes in a glorious range of colors, including precious metals. Why not paint just about anything made of a textile: bedspreads, shower curtains, upholstered chairs…? Check out these gold-spliced chairs from Anthropologie’s exhibit of New Orleans artists… read more…
The Selby recently posted its favorite photos of 2010. So we choose our favorites of its favorites: all have an idea that we can put to use (or at least make us think), like stacking books horizontally as well as vertically on our library shelves: the flow and visuals are totally different. The wall of book in the picture looks almost like a patchwork quilt…
We love the idea of making a cloth or paper panel printed with a big view, as a kind of trompe l’oeil, to expand a space, like this (though we’d probably not choose convenience store shelves, as funny as it is).. read more…
Being a cook with ongoing kitchen design fantasies, I’m always on the lookout for solutions that are wonderful to look at and completely functional. I LOVE this stove hood by Architects Lhoas & Lhoas that looks like a modern sculpture; I imagine its lovely asymmetry subtly shifting the way I feel – and cook – in the kitchen. Since many range hoods have to be custom-made by a metal fabricator, it doesn’t seem like it would be such a stretch, or that expensive, to make one with more unusual lines, like this one. It would be beautiful in plain aluminum or steel, which could probably be powder-coated in a color, OR could easily be covered in wood to make painting it easy (changing colors as your mood changes).
Here’s another gorgeous hood we found on Lhoas & Lhoas site: read more…
The New York Times recently reported that the Finnish technology firm Nokia had developed a prototype for the an internet-ready touch screen years before the iPad. The company didn’t pursue developing it for the market because they got cold feet, worrying it would be an expensive flop:
“It was very early days, and no one really knew anything about the touch screen’s potential,” Mr. Hakkarainen explained. “And it was an expensive device to produce, so there was more risk involved for Nokia. So management did the usual. They killed it.”
Yikes! Nokia did the very thing that famously puts the kibosh on innovation: taking what seemed like the safe route at the time. It called to mind two quotes we had in our files, both from a site of “space quotations/rocketry quotes“. (Rocket launches and space travel would never had occurred if safety was the main concern.) read more…
Deborah Kass
Thank you for bearing with’the improvised life’ going “dark” for a bit. We appreciated the very warm words and wishes we received and took them with us, heartened. We’re back, changed by having spent time with someone whose long life is winding down; we find ourselves viewing things through a different lens. Instead of jumping back into work and obligations with a vengeance as we normally do, we did the opposite and went to lunch with a friend, and then walked in the beautiful chilly day to see the Houdini show at the Jewish Museum, wondering what would happen if we didn’t do things in the usual way?
The Houdini show, full of Houdiniana and interesting Houdini-inspired artworks like Matthew Barney’s Ehrich Weiss Suite, sent us poking around the Jewish Museum’s website. That led to our discovery of Deborah Kass‘ work, whose paintings from a series called Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times seem right on point… read more…
Life Edited is a movement to reduce our environmental impact by simplifying our lives at home. In this short video, Treehugger founder Graham Hill sums up its challenge to rethink how you live, to reduce your footprint, to live better and save money and resources. He asks
“What if I lived in a couple of hundred square feet less? This is an equation I really wanted to explore, so I started a site, LifeEdited.org“.
The site is a place for him to try out the ideas he’s been thinking about for years… and for you to submit yours (for various prizes)… “Ruthless editing of your stuff, transforming furniture, space-saving housewares, digitizing your life and sharing systems.”
Life Edited’s mandate: “Less but better…”
Right up our alley! We’re going to keep an idea on this one.
via Core 77
Sally Schneider
Blogging is hard on us – not psychically – we love researching and discovery and sharing – but physically: our backs suffer from hours of sitting and we’re getting a little plump (many days, we’re hard-pressed to tear ourselves away to work out; before we know it, the day is GONE). Plus, we’ve been reading about how bad sitting for long periods is. Yeah, we know about getting up to stretch every hour, and doing tai chi, and …all the helpful things that we’re trying to get disciplined enough to do…
What we really wish is that there was a way to work while we work out: actually write and edit photos for our posts, not just read or listen to music. We decided to try out our fantasy of rigging a treadmill with a laptop, to make a treadmill desk. The idea is you walk slowly as you work, and over time, you cover a lot of ground, burn calories and moving your body really helps it. Why not? we thought.
We took a plywood board to the gym, placed it across the rails of a treadmill and set our laptop on it. Then we started walking, really slowly at first, while we got acclimated enough to actually open a document and write. It was pretty relaxing, felt good to be moving and standing rather than sitting…though not something we the management of our gym would let us do on a regular basis. But IF you had your own treadmill in your space, it would be a viable alternative…
We’ve discovered that other people have had the same idea. read more…
We had no idea we could laugh at will until we read The Laughing Guru in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Madan Kataria promotes Laughter Yoga, which he says can be a cure for all sorts of physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. We have a few of those, so we thought we’d try it. We wondered if laughing at will would just add up to a kind of false, phony-baloney laughter to dupe ourselves into thinking that things are fine when they’re not.
We found we COULD just laugh, and once we started, it was easy to keep going. Then we tried laughing with a friend on the phone (he had read the article and had been privately trying it out). We found ourselves laughing so hard we were holding our bellies. Forced laughing, when done with other people, soon becomes real laughing, like some wild and beneficial virus. We discovered that laughing has a strange effect, a REAL effect totally different than we were imagining. It seems to short-circuit anxiety and shift the view immediately. Try it for yourself!
Says Kataria: “Laughter is a choice. A connector of people. No barriers. No language.”
In this YouTube video, 250 people came together at dawn in Mumbai, to LAUGH like crazy. read more…
Otto Zitko
We found this image of artist Otto Zitko’s work “destiny of the line” on You Have Been Here Sometime. What a swell playroom it would make.
We spotted this great table at MC&Co, a Brooklyn-based company that makes furniture and household accessories (including copies of a Donal Judd daybed and a Rietveld outdoor chair)…It’s a hinged rectangular laminate top set on ash saw horses. To expand the table, you lift the top, open it like a book and set it back down on its base.
It’s a great idea to copy…cut two equal rectangles of veneered or Baltic birch plywood, attach them with hinges and set it on some cool-looking sawhorses (check out our round-up). Gear the size to suit your space and needs…(and the width of your sawhorses)…
Related posts: Sawhorse Tables as Solution + Sculpture
