Studio Ve’s Endy’s line of furniture gave us a quick, smart design solution for handling the cut ends of d-i-y wood furniture: paint them colors to accent the intention of the cuts and a lot of charm.
materials
the best fabric pen for ‘drawing just for fun’
joel henriques
On the great blog Made by Joel, when we found a post that began: “I was drawing…just for fun.” We love to hear about people experimenting, with no particular destination in mind. In the end, he took one of the drawings and turned it into a little pillow for one of his kids.
He also mentioned his favorite fabric pens
painted stones for home a la max ernst
We’ve long been a fan of keeping found rocks and stones around the house. They make visually wonderful “sculptures” and they have many impromptu practical purposes, to keep a door from blowing closed, act as bookend, smash garlic or spices or weight a butterflied chicken cooking in a skillet...
Images of Max Ernst’s painted stones we saw recently on Mondoblogo takes our imaginings to new heights. Why not PAINT our found stones? read more…
alexander calder’s inspired bathroom improvisations
photo: pedro guerrero
…a bit of inspiration from one of our favorite books, Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder
for stylish d-i-y shipping pallet furniture: paint it black!
We’ve checked out A LOT of d-i-y shipping pallet furniture, and have been contemplating possibilities for plywood shelving with unfinished edges. Today we realized the simple key to keeping these recycled wood creations from bordering on “granola” and making them more stylish: paint them. White is always reliable (dig this white-painted coffee table), but black or dark gray can do wonders. Apart’s black sofa made (carefully) of shipping pallet wood and painted black is a great example of the possibilities, even in rougher iterations: read more…
curiously chic duct tape safety glasses
We love these curiously chic duct-tape safety glasses and assumed they were made by duct taping an existing pair of glasses, until we found the how-to and list of ingredients: duct tape, a hanger, a beer bottle and two plastic furniture caster cups. Will wonders never cease??!!!
Related posts: zebra duct tape!!
duct tape: potato chip bag pants
duct tape repair of bear-ravaged plane
back on Thursday (maybe sooner) + duct tape
unhemmed (ripped) linen with yarn stitching
We’ve long been fans of unhemmed linen tableclothes, napkins, shower curtains – a rectangle of pure linen just ripped to leave a raw edge *. We hadn’t though of this swell embellishment: the yarn stitching accentuates the intentionality of NOT-HEMMED in a really beautiful and charming way. read more…
dominic wilcox’s ‘speed creating’ wakes up your thinking
photo: dominic wilcox
When we want to wake/shake up our thinking, we check in at Dominic Wilcox‘s blog Variations on Normal. You never know what that clever guy will come up with. We especially love his month-long project, Speed Creating. Every day for 30 consecutive days, HE practiced waking up his thinking by making something creative with whatever was at hand in the course of his day, whether at home, in his studio, on the subway – anywhere. Writes Wilcox:
I believe that this self-imposed project with it’s constraints on time and money will force me to take an instinctive and experimental approach. The fear of failure and the usual time spent thinking through the potential pitfalls of a project will not be an option and I will need to react swiftly to my thoughts, observations and experimental outcomes discovered along the way. I am not focused solely on the final objects or images but on the creative journey I take. Complete failures are expected and embraced.
We love that Wilcox created a practice with inbuilt constraints designed to push his own limits and experiment, embracing the possibility of failure. You can see the 30 projects he came up with here. We especially love his Measuring Tape Diary made by spray painting an extended measuring tape white, and then recording the events of his day on it. We can imagine someone – or Wilcox himself – coming across it years later, and opening it up to discover…a day.
Check out his curiously beautiful Onion Ring Fabric made by glueing together bright orange onion crisps with flexible glue: read more…
sighting: extreme masking tape repair
photo: anthony giglio
Our friend and resident oenophile Anthony Giglio snapped this picture of a rather bold and desperate masking tape repair. We see it as a fine example of what we are frequently told is the powerful effect of reading ‘the improvised life’ daily: gradually you’re vision changes. You not only ‘see’ and delight in found improvisations around you, but you also find yourself improvising solutions to all sorts of dilemmas.
Who needs an auto body shop?
This crazy repair eminded us of There I Fixed It, a blog chock full of desperate, uninhibited and sometimes brilliant fixes.
Related posts: ‘window box’ car bumper
the beauty of black masking tape
d-i-y “masked” painted tables
japanese masking tape in cool colors +patterns
one chair or table leg painted (pink!)
swarm studios for antropologie
We’ve written about painting chair and table legs, and we’ve written about pink but we’ve never considered putting the two ideas together…until we came across this image of just one leg of a chair painted pink. It’s a lovely visual surprise that makes an old chair looks like it’s dressed to-the-nines.
Although in reality, every leg of this table is painted pink, this picture got us imagining how just one leg or even two legs painted would look: much better to our eye. read more…
doodles and drawings as on-demand textile designs
photo: andrea raisfled
After reading our post about how to design your own textiles, our friend Andrea Raisfeld sent us this doodle by her daughter Maxie: “I thought it would make a great fabric design.” We’d love to find some fabric like this… Another great example of where your designs for on-demand textiles can come from.
Related posts: copy this: paint a pillow…sofa…bedspread…curtain…
sewing advice for beginners
copy this: “moderne” patchwork tablecloth
painted fabric redux: clothes!
design your own textiles
via modernthread.blogspot.com
We love the way the internet can increase people’s ability to design and fabricate things that have traditionally been the realm of professional designers and manufacturers. Our newest favorite online resource/service is digital fabric printing. Over the past three or four years, a number of online textile printers have popped up, including Spoonflower, Karma Kraft, and Fabric on Demand. While each site differs slightly in what they offer and how they work with you, the general principal remains the same: you pick a pattern or design your own, upload it to the site and select your fabric type and reference colors; then wait for your fabric (or practice swatch) to arrive at your front door.
As always, part of the trick is deciding which service to try. Luckily, Kim at TrueUp did the leg-work for us in 2009, printing the same design with four different companies. (One of them, Eye Candey, doesn’t seem to exist anymore). Her experience is extremely helpful, and includes tips about what file type and image resolution to use, as well as the differences in pigment type and the importance of color-correcting. She also created this handy comparison pdf (updated in March 2010) so you can see the differences between each printer.
If you’ve ever wanted to design your own textiles, it doesn’t get much easier than this. Need some ideas for patterns? We find them everywhere, read more…
rough, hand-painted stripes on walls
photo: paul raeside
Spotted in a long post on Desire to Inspire showing work of interiors photographer Paul Raeside: walls with roughly painted stripes. Right up our alley: graphical, imperfect, charming, do-able…though perhaps not as easy as it looks (we’d practice first on some scraps sheets of plywood or walls we plan to paint over, or even heavy paper tacked on the wall). read more…
string lights as everyday indoor lighting
- photo: blog.ounodesign.com
The great blog Ouno recently documented a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyds Wright’s winter home and the main campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. A photo of the “dinner cabaret room” caught our eye: strings of tiny lights glowe3d on the ceiling. We don’t know if this is a Wrightian touch or an innovation of the current caretakers (more images below). But it got us thinking about using string lights as actual indoor lighting…not Christmas lights, but strings of lights with bigger, more illuminating bulbs.
So, we went on the hunt for ideas and sources, to explore the possibilities.
We love these lights hung vertically to make a partition and define a room… read more…
the unexpected stylishness of walls of stacked logs
The image of a Khan market storefront in Delhi spotted on Ouno got us thinking about strangely beautiful walls of stacked logs can be. We’ve blogged some in the past, but recently found some new iterations of the great, elemental and possibly practical idea. Check out this chic wall in Alpenstueck restaurant in Berlin: read more…
