Sally Schneider
Wandering around Harlem recently, we spotted this structure in the back of someone’s brownstone. It appears to be a clever combination porch and treehouse, literally built AROUND the tree growing in the yard.
Whoever made it clearly didn’t want to mess with the old tree growing very close to the house. So they found away to…embrace it.
read more…
Susan Dworski
We have a nasty patch of rubble in the back alley guarded by unsightly bent pipes that protect a gas meter. Every fall I throw a packet of wildflower seeds down, scratch them in, and wait to see what the rains will bring. It’s different every year. Nasturtiums and poppies duke it out neck and neck for starters (below). Quickly followed by the big guys: penstamom, coreopsis, feverfew, lupine and cosmos (above). read more…
Maria Robledo
We’ve just discovered photographer Maria’s Robledo’s crazy-beautiful Instagram, a trove of images that will make you SEE the everyday differently and put you right in the moment. Only Maria could have come up with this simple, curiously moving arrangements of pussy willow blossoms (which people usually just throw away once they’ve been knocked off their stem). The image shouts SPRING. It seems the perfect accompaniment to this 4-line gem of a poem by Su Tung-p’o written over a thousand years ago:
Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green –
when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town.
Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering –
in a lifetime how many springs do we see? read more…
insideinside.tumblr.com
Dig this wondrous display of succulents on an unused staircase (well, er, we assume it’s not used, otherwise it would quite an unusual challenge to navigate)!
It shouts JOY and a kind of uninhibited artfulness.
Succulents are in the wind…or are we just SEEING them now?
Maria Robledo brought us one as a house gift. We lifted it out of its plastic pot and plunked it into a jar. It looks like a sculpture… read more…
designboom.com
We are big fans of outdoor rooms—outdoor spaces defined in such a way as to make them feel like rooms in plein air— and have featured a number of them over the years. (One of our favorites is the lovely outdoor “room” that Constantino Nivola created on his Long Island property.) We were smitten when we saw this outdoor pavilion designed by pedro&juana, on show in the gardens of Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura, Mexico City. It references traditional terra cotta flower pots and vases used in the former garden of architect Luis Barragán (situated next door). Bright yellow and green tops made of MDF are randomly placed on some of the vases to offer tiered seating. read more…
Greg Munson
Last Thursday, ‘improvised life’ reader Sue Anderson sent us these extraordinary photograph taken during the massive May blizzard that hit the Midwest last week, with this report:
This goose with a “can-do” attitude may be of interest to you. I suppose you have heard about the snow storm currently underway in the US Midwest. Here in southeastern Minnesota classes are cancelled, roads are closed, travel is not advised, but this mother Canada goose remains on the job. This photo sent to me by my friend Greg Munson who lives in Rochester, MN, where today’s record May snowfall amount will likely exceed a foot…..
The goose is nesting on a city-owned retention pond at the back of his property. Greg tells me that the goose still remains on the nest today, although some of the snow has melted from her back so she is not as deeply buried as before.
…while we are still getting light snow and sleet today, our temps are predicted to climb from near freezing up to around 70 degrees in the next 4 days with snow giving way to rain. Although it will be hard to learn if those diligently protected goose eggs end up being lost to flooding, we have to keep in mind that this is often nature’s way.
Here’s the first image Sue sent; the valiant goose’s head is just above the snowline: read more…
Chris Ramirez/New York Times
Keith Stewart is a writer despite himself. Even with the massive responsibilities and demands of his organic farm with it’s hundred or so varieties of produce, he has written regularly and wonderfully about the inside of farming and living a rural life, from numerous magazine articles to It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life
A couple of years ago, Keith embarked on summing-up the essentials he’d learned over decades of farming, having started from-scratch as an escapee from the city. It was a massive undertaking on top of the ever-changing, improvisational, exhausting, gratifying realities of farming. Storey’s Guide to Growing Organic Vegetables & Herbs for Market
Reading Keith’s book, I find myself an avid armchair farmer, as much from happily learning about Seed Germination and Potable Water Tests as by the more general life principles scattered throughout the book (the hallmark of all of Keith’s writing), like Surprise, Excesses of Youth, Competing Forces and Looking After Number One. The honest, methodical thinking behind Twenty Points to Ponder before becoming a farmer, which include Deal Makers and Deal Breakers, could be applied to just about any business. I especially like Question Marks, which make for illuminating self-analysis. Here are a few: read more…
Sally Schneider
We were wandering through Saks Fifth Avenue the other day fending off smiling sales people trying to spray us with perfume, when we saw a surprising woman with a bold tattoo of the classic feminist Venus fist ; she was sitting at the Chanel counter checking out some makeup. We loved her style that was SO HER OWN and so completely the opposite of what you think Chanel person might be: she seemed totally comfortable in herself, shattering the mold, presonceived ideas, cliches… read more…
Susan Jacobson
We’ve written about the unexpected stylishiness of stacked logs before but love this particularly charming and effective storage for firewood and fallen timber: a fence of stacked logs (snapped by Susan Jacobson as she drove by in her car).
Related posts:
storing firewood indoors = firewood as storage unit
d-i-y stacked wood fireplace mantle
woodpile as art
tree trunks and rocks as display cases + stools
Clayton Cubitt
Spotted on Claton Cubitt’s tumblr and worth checking out full size: “cargo bike incorporating a shopping cart and chain link fence, with a blood-red wrought-iron cowcatcher (and cup holder), New Orleans.”
The awesomness of the human imagination! This practical AND aestheric considerations here are stunning…
Related posts: clever shelving configured for bicycle storage
bikes for hauling + great accessories
danny macaskill’s new video: what he thinks as he rides
sighting: improvised bike carriers
gifts + inspiration for bikers (and walkers)
I’ve been thinking a lot about birds lately, about the mystery of their migrations; their unerring return each spring.
Our Cooper’s hawk is back from the dry barrancas of Zapotecas, its familiar kek-kek-kek vying with argumentative crows and cooing mourning doves at dawn. Improvisatory arboreal architects are at work big time.
Humingbird hangs its timid sac of cat fur and melaleuca leaves on a spike of palm.
Crows strip fresh tar paper off a neighbor’s roof with giddy joy…Hawks cart heavier loads of urban detritus to the pines, creating castles of thatched twiggery.
There’s sex and magic in the air, a synesthesia of feathers and song. Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’abal, lauded as a “Mayan Basho”, describes it in Poems I Brought Down from the Mountain
lambchop
Recently, we noticed a spike in traffic to our 2009 post d-i-y lace chain link fence. Ho, are people trying to figure out how to make chain link fences look better at last? What we loved in that early post was that someone had brilliantly seen that the metal grid of a chainlink fence is really a loom for weaving (think of those pot holder looms you used as a kid). The’d transformed ugly chain link with lacey crochet.
Looking around for more iterations, we found Michigan-based artist Lambchop’s Typographic Fences project. The Michigan-based artist weaves words and phrases into chain-link fences using ordinary flagging tape
(Video link here.) Above, a trailer for Deceptive Practice, the new documentary about brilliant sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay. For a totaly entertaining read, check out this 1993 New Yorker profile of Jay by Mark Singer.
For those of us haunted by the instantaneous life changes that occurred to so many wounded in the Boston bombing, The Times’ heartening article about new technologies and therapies for amputees.
And a fund you can contribute to for those most affected by the bombing (prosthetics and rehab costs A LOT).
17 projects from Pinterest that people tried to do and FAILED
From beyond-brilliant chef Thomas Keller, the difference between passion and desire (via Swiss-Miss) read more…
Susan Dworski
Mindfulness practice – learning to be present in each moment– is something many people are embracing these days. Business are incorporating it and classes abound. Perhaps the most often-recommended “exercise” is washing dishes mindfully, although we know few people who really do it. Recently, we heard of one that did, truly. No surprise, it is Susan Dworski who, we are finding out, is a kind of radical activist of the everyday:
Several years ago I ripped out the dishwasher, built shelves and installed a deep, double sink. A cottage kitchen forces such Luddite decisions.The peace that descended after its removal was profound. Dishwashing became less a chore, more a meditation. Hot soapy water and plates air-drying silently on the tiled countertop are a balm after the roar of the rinse cycle and clattering silverware.
sprinklesinsprings.com
On Sprinkles and Springs, we came across this diy striped tee inspired by the modish tee-shirt Marc Jacobs recently featured in his chic, stripey collection. It is a great example of I COULD MAKE THAT thinking that has infiltrated many a clever head. Sprinkles and Springs saw it and figured out how using a plain white tee shirt, masking tape and fabric paint. And then she generously posted a how-to that you could use to make Jacobs-ish stripes or your own graphic pattern (the method would also work fine on jeans, slipcovers, pillows, many fabrics…) read more…
