Last week, we read an amazing post by Anne Herbert at Peace, Love and Noticing the Details. She described the limited view we’ve been stricken with many times – and offered a simple way out. It is so perfectly and succinctly written, we’re quoting the whole thing right here:
“I can’t do it. All the times I say inside to myself, “I can’t do it,” I could be saying, what the heck, thoughts are easy, ‘I can do it.’
I need to find the knowing how to do it. The brain is vast, deep, includes the whole body. And the body includes the whole world as I hear someone on the street speak who just got back from a place I think of as elsewhere, as I breathe air that who knows where it’s been.
Who knows how to do this that I’ve been telling myself that I can’t do? Maybe me, as is, now, if I get confident, listen to “I can do it,” and sink into what I already know. Maybe I need to hang with someone else who’s been doing it for a while, and watch, listen, move. How big the world.“
Thank you very much, Anne Herbert. You are a gift!
Jon at Happy Mundane spotted these cool adaptable dining tables by Muuto (which means “new perspective” in Finnish) that can be ordered with different legs, tops, and colors. They reminded him of the possibilities for painting wooden tables in interesting ways by masking off parts with tape, something he did to wooden chairs a while back with great success. Here’s his how-to with the gist of this simple idea…and pix of the chairs…AND some resources for cheap wooden tables that would look cool (and expensive) painted this way… read more…
Constance Old recently alerted us to Crispina ffrench’s work:
“Crispina ffrench is an artist/crafter who makes terrific “improvised’ work. She is author of a recent book called The Sweater Chop Shop: Sewing One-of-a-Kind Creations from Recycled Sweaters which teaches how to cut and felt cast-off sweaters to make them into cool new things: like mufflers, blankets, pillows, and…even other sweaters. I have a really beautiful blanket she made (below). She has her own website www.crispina.com and sells work through Etsy.”
Felting is essentially a controlled way of washing knitted wool until it shrinks and tightens, changing both texture and color. We started to imagine huge possibilities right then and there (and in the inadvertently shrunken sweaters we may have mistakenly given away)…
We also remembered Page Goolrick telling us about the black turtleneck she made into a cardigan; she cut it right up the front with a scissors and had her local tailor sew in a big stainless steel zipper…
We started to deconstruct our notions about cut knit unravelling unmercifully, and started to think about old sweaters completely differently… read more…
Pascal Anson sussed out kitchen cabinets and discovered that cabinet makers earn their serious money from the doors, which cost much more than the base cabinets. So he bought base cabinets from IKEA and then bought a mish-mash of doors that had been marked way down. Easy and cheap. There’s a caveat though:
“The rule with this kind of thing is…if you’re going to use a mix of doors, make sure it is a REAL mix and looks really really wrong, not just a little bit wrong.”
We love the idea of REALLY REALLY WRONG as design concept…when you push dissonance to cool…
We also love that Anson’s little video wakes your head up to the way kitchen cabinets work: read more…
Pascal Anson is the ultimate ALT-Martha Stewart, a true challenge to keeping everything within-the-lines and predictable. He’s made some videos which we plan to run periodically to remind ourselves that a guy on tv (well almost; we wish he were on tv) can inspire EXPLOSIVE!, original thinking about d-i-y and home improvement. Pascal’s view of things is a joy and a relief: charming, thoughtful, playful and inspiring…
Gever Tulley, founder of Tinkering School for Kids, has published Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), a book we’ve been waiting for, not just to give to the kids we know, but us adults as well, because the same idea applies: By exploring the world (maybe doing things we never got to do as kids) we learn and get ideas and new develop parts of ourselves. I want to:
throw a spear…
…make a bomb in a bag…
…spend an hour blindfolded…
…construct my own flying machine…
…melt glass…
Tulley isn’t cavalierly sending your kids (or you) into danger. He gives detailed instruction and explanations about the why’s and how’s things work, as well as possible dangers. He figures, wisely, if your kid really understands how something works, she will be more able to navigate its challenges herself, use it creatively AND stay safer.
About a year ago, Tulley gave a taste of his book-to-be in a TED talk called “Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do”. It’s full of wisdom about learning, creativity and danger safety. Here’s the video, and the transcript, along with a page from the new book:
Designer and contributor-of-brilliant-ideas Pamela Hovland recently improvised wonderful wrist-warmers out of an old pair of wool socks. Here’s how this inspired bit of repurposing came about, in her own words and photos:
“I often wear wrist warmers while I’m working away at my computer as my hands are cold from the fall to the spring. I first saw them in northern Sweden; someone was selling hand-knit versions at an artisan’s market in a remote village. I remember that I didn’t know what they were; I was simply attracted to the colors and patterns. Once I figured it out, however, I bought a pair knit from beautiful charcoal grey and burnt orange wool and ended up wearing them nearly every day last winter.
A few months ago I washed some beautiful (and expensive) wool socks in the washing machine by mistake, and as a result, they shrunk. As I couldn’t bear to throw them out, it occurred to me that perhaps I could repurpose them somehow. read more…
Amidst the images of devastation and loss coming out of Haiti yesterday were some symbols of of hope. Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), whose medical facilities in Haiti were destroyed during the earthquake, were able to set up remarkable inflatable hospitals as triage centers ministering to devastated Port au Prince. They were there, even as other relief workers were finding it almost impossible to get through. It seems as though Doctors Without Borders is always “there” somehow.
In Greece many years ago I met a women who volunteered as a nurse for MSF. She would leave her life on the beautiful island of Chios on a moments notice to give service in the most dire of situations. What fierce stuff she is made of, I thought, unable to imagine having the strength to experience all that she had.
And although I often hear people talking about doing something rather than “just giving money”, sometimes giving money is the most effective thing we can do for the moment: a way of giving support to those who are there helping those in such dire need. read more…
Working Big is a remarkable book about large-scale art projects for kids. Written in 1975, it is long out-of-print, but available these days as a free, downloadable pdf from Public Collectors. It gives an expansive view (with how-to’s) of discovery projects to do with your own kids, or fantasize about for your (grown-up) self.
Working Big’s essential premise is that kids and artists often take similar approaches in exploring and working with their environment. Its chapter titles – ”Kids’ Space Equals Artists’ Space” and “The Artist Shapes as the Child Shapes” – should be printed on tee shirts, or scrawled on walls. Pictures of kids working away with obvious pleasure are interspersed with images of works by notable artists, like Robert Smithson‘s earthworks, The Broken Circle and Amarillo Ramp. This inspiring book holds a lot of wisdom about kids AND the creative process in general:
“When nature itself provides the medium, children are eager and intuitive artists. They need no one to tell them that the moist grittiness of sand is just right for sculpturing or read more…
Years ago, New York photographer Maria Robledo designed this simple, functional and really cool-looking storage for her studio. A few hours before she moved to a new space, I ran over to photograph them for ‘the improvised life’ because they are so smart and great, even though she’d emptied them out. They once held an impressive amount of office and photographic supplies, and linens and props for shoots.
Maria’s wall of cabinets is an unfussy, easy-to-duplicate approach that would translate well to all sorts of spaces. read more…
Photographer Maria Robledo emailed me this picture of a winter crocus taken with her i-Phone, with the message: “Needs nothing but light to illuminate us.”
She was given crocus bulbs bought from the local farmer’s market as a house-warming present. She had only to place one root-side down in a bowl and expose it to light to awaken the flower within.
Several kinds of bulbs hold the potential to valiantly bloom in winter; the easiest are those that do not need a period of cold before exposure to sun. These include crocuses, hyacinths, paperwhites and daffodils. Here’s the simple method from Ed Hume Seeds: read more…
Recently, 2 or 3 Things I Know posted a picture of this table by the artist Donald Judd; it is miraculous in its simplicity and harmony. I put my face close to the screen to contemplate the structure. It looked to me to be made of big sheets of plywood with an ash or birch veneer: a surface on a base.
Could it be that the base is made of notched sheets of plywood similar to those House of Cards games I remember from my childhood? read more…
Kerry Polite/The Design Center at Philadelphia University
The Dutch design firm Demakersvan created this lace chain-link fence in response to a challenge by the Design Center at Philadelphia University: to create a site-specific work inspired by a collection of historic Quaker lace, for an exhibition called Lace in Translation. Demakersvan totally transformed ugly industrial fencing by applying what looks to me to be tatting, the age-old technique of making intricate patterns of lace by hand, using a single thread. It’s such a simple and great idea to temper the almost universal ugliness and reproach (KEEP OUT!!) of chainlink, it’s a wonder no one thought of it before. Demakersvan sums it up: “Like brambles fences are rising rampantly around us. What would happen if a patch of embroidered wire would meet with and continue as an industrial fence. Hostility versus kindness, industrial versus craft.
Demakersvan asked the simple question “What would happen if…? to find their brilliant idea. read more…
Gever Tully started a Tinkering School for kids, an exploratory curriculum designed to teach kids how to build the things they think of. By exploratory he means setting kids loose in a shop full of tools and materials (with supervision) and encouragement to “fool around”. In his wonderful TED talk, Tully describes the “deep internal realization” kids have from the experience, which happen to be the same ones you get (at any age) from improvising:
“that you can figure things out as you fool around”…
…nothing turns out as planned – ever…
…all projects go awry…
…success is in the doing (failures are celebrated and analyzed; problems become puzzles)…”
As I watched Tulley’s talk, I thought: I want to go there! I want a tinkering school for grownups! read more…
Once the door to an idea opens, information often miraculously seems to appear. There’s some sort of attunement that seems to happen when you hold a question in mind and start trying to figure it out; perhaps it’s simply a shift in awareness that makes us see the answers around us.
Right after I wrote about d-i-y pizza-ovens, I started to stumble upon books and websites with in-depth instructions and resources for building and using wood-fired ovens, a change in name that expands the content considerably (beyond pizza – just about any food benefits from being cooked in a wood-fired oven). Even if you don’t actually have a space to build a wood-fired oven right now, these resources can help you formulate ideas for when you do, or for when you’re out camping and want to apply some of its principles to a make-shift oven. Some books, like the definitive The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens, will even guide you to achieving some of the effects of a masonry oven, using an ordinary gas or electric oven. read more…
which teaches how to cut and 
, a book we’ve been waiting for, not just to give to the kids we know, but us adults as well, because the same idea applies: By exploring the world (maybe doing things we never got to do as kids) we learn and get ideas and new develop parts of ourselves. I want to:
, will even guide you to achieving some of the effects of a masonry oven, using an ordinary gas or electric oven. 
