We’ve been getting an increasing number of emails from readers their shipping pallet improvisations, as they push they realm of pallet invention. A recent favorite: this swell, stylish staircase by Natasha Figueroa and her husband Dan Husted who live in an up-and-coping gallery district in Copenhagen, Denmark.
We have a private gallery/studio located in Kødbyen, which is the old meatpacking district. Lot45 is the name, and it is an old ‘skin-house’, where they used to hang the hides for curing. Since we did all the work ourselves, we kept the budget quite tight and try to re-use as much as we could. Seeing as the meatpacking district still functions, there are a lot of old pallets laying about. Dan designed and built this so that it can also function as a hang-out during openings & parties.
Their pallet staircase functions as an old fashioned stoop where their friends do indeed hang out… read more…
We’ve browsed endless catalogues that feature chic, expensive house numbers. We’ve always preferred the ones Isabel Rower devised out of washi tape. Then we saw THIS wonderful graphic house number done in ordinary paint. It could be any size and color(s) you want. The trick would be in finding or making a template that makes for beautiful lines, though freehand could be really beautiful.
We’re crazy for rusted metal. We love the intentionally-rusted corton steel planters used at the High Line have amassed a strangely beautiful collection of pieces we’ve found in our wanderings, like the three-sided forms we use as book or artwork stands. So we were smitten when we saw images of this very modern house designed by Blank Studio, with its juxtaposition of rusted corrugated metal and plexiglass. It made us run to look up how to intentionally rust corrugated metal (which you can do using photo acid and other methods).
It gave us some ideas for the ancient garden chair we’ve set out on the terrace to see what would happen if we let it rust, intentionally. read more…
While we were away, we got a very succinct, very cool email from reader Gorden Ammermann, with photos of the wonderful shipping pallet bed he made:
hi,
maybe i´ve something for your site. be free to post it: my new diy-pallet-bed
greetz
gorden
We not only love the white painted bed, but the deliciously rumpled linens in a very simple room as well. You can get the gist of Ammermann’s creation from the other two photos he sent: read more…
Artist Holton Rower, of 3,000,000+ YouTube hits fame, (not to mention inventor of fabulous leather door pulls) takes all his tools very seriously, including the camera on his phone. It has a lens that is precision, easily damagable glass, just like any other good camera. You wouldn’t put a camera in your bag without its lens cap on, so why do it with your phone? We hadn’t thought of this obvious fact; Holton did. He devised an insta-lens cap: a piece of blue masking tape, which leaves no residue, and be “opened” and “closed” many times before it need replacing.
Simple, efficient, smart!
(And if you don’t like Holton’s rough look, snip the tape cleanly across with a scissors to make a more graphical embellishment.)
(Video link here). Our recent balloon post about how wonderful it felt to let balloons go (and make a wish) created quite an uproar. It seems we hadn’t considered the environmental impact of balloons – especially the foil kind – on the environment, so we redacted it and tried to impart some semblence of fair-and-unbiased reporting into the mix. Even though we haven’t done deep enough research to know if latex balloons properly filled with helium and without ribbons pose a dire environmental risk, we’re stearing clear of sending balloons into the atmosphere, in case.
One reader had a suggestion: “tissue wishing papers that when lit on fire float into the air until they disappear into tiny bits of ash. My friends and I let the birthday person wish on one and send it soaring.” We googled “wishing papers” and came up with “sky lanterns“. They are purportedly biodegradable lanterns are made out of rice paper, non-toxic wax and bamboo. Their wax “fuel cell” is essentially a candle which when lit, creates air currents that cause the paper lantern to fly into the air, as much as a mile high.read more…
Our new neighborhood is hit-or-miss for flowers…come to think of it, our old one was as well. Sometimes, when you REALLY need them to liven up the place, there just isn’t much of a selection. Then we took the word “liven” to heart in thinking about alternatives we could use when we couldn’t find great flowers. It’s having something alive, and from nature that really works the magic…flowers just happen to be one of many possibilities. We love these summer apricots in the brass basket a friend recently gave us from The Museum of Arts and Design’s store in New York City (and available by mail order). Imagine the setting WITHOUT this alt-arrangement and you see what a difference it makes.
We’ve also taken to picking up leafy, newly fallen branches read more…
Since we started renovating ‘the improvised life’s space’ we’ve had our eyes peeled for solutions to various design problems. We’re finding that once we have a question in our head, inspiration and ideas can come from the most unlikely places.
Desperately needing a proper desk to work on, we hurredly devised one out of hollow core doors (below) on spray painted salvaged file cabinets. It works fine – a sleek 13 feet, but we weren’t crazy about the wood veneer, which has an unexpectedly reddish cast. Wonder what we could do to change it?: reverse-painted glass crossed our minds, as did slabs of steel or copper we found at a an internet site. Then two modernist Italian vases we saw on Mondoblogo grabbed our attention. What if we painted the desktop that fabulous red of the fifties vase by Antonia Campi, above? read more…
In our wanderings online – always on the lookout for room screens – we stumbled on this intriguing room screen with huge possibilities for improvising and tailoring to your space. Comprised of a series of hinged canvas-covered panels, you can use it as-is for a neutral, minimalist look OR paint or draw designs on it – even cover the panels with fabric or photographs of your own choosing. The screen is, literally, a blank canvas. It comes in a variety of heights from 4“, 6″, and 7“ , and your choice of 3, 4, 5, or 6 panels. A 6-foot six panel screen costs $179 plus shipping, which seems like a bargain; the hard labor done, all that’s left to do is decorate it: with paintings, color blocks, writing…the possibilities are endless.
For inspiration, check out some of our posts about painting and drawing on fabric and furniture: read more…
A Mexican Day of the Dead smoking shrine found in Oaxaca Mexico – note the cigarettes on top.
I have not smoked for eleven years – it’s working!
We know quite a few people who have created personal shrines over the years: arrangements of privately meaningful and sacred objects, quotes, images that remind, give power, hold an intention or a wish…
..like this one of a friend; it changes every once-in-a-while: the placement of elements shift, new pieces are added in. Anything can be a shrine: the configuration and meaning in the eyes – and heart – of the maker. read more…
The soap dish is one of those inventions that seem destined to NOT fulfill all the requirements we need them too. Designed to keep bar soap from sitting in water, the wet residue from the soap has to end up somewhere, either on the sink/tub surface or in the bottom of the soap dish, requiring cleaning later.
When we moved into our new space recently, finding a well-designed soap dish was not high on our list of endless more-essential things to accomplish. Without thinking, we improvised one: a simple dry sponge we’d had on hand. It absorbed the watery residue from the bar of soap with no mess, and because it barely got wet, there was no issue of mildewing. To clean it, we just wet the sponge and rinse it out. It seems we’d inadvertently found the perfect soap dish.
H-m-m-m. What if we got a nice looking sponge, like a white one ? (Is there such a thing as a white sponge)? We discovered Twist Naked Sponge on Amazon. read more…
We found this on Marc Johns’ website the recently. His own words tell its story better than we ever could:
I wrote this in my sketchbook the other day, as a reminder/statement/ mantra to myself. I used to spend all day in front of a computer, emailing, photoshopping, designing, layout-ing, etc. I enjoyed being a designer (and making things with pixels and code is great), but personally, I still needed to use my hands, even if it was just to make some marks on paper. That’s why I started drawing on post-it notes. They were small and quick and raw and immediate and I could do them on my lunch break. I craved the spontaneity, the imperfections of ink bleeding on paper, of lines not matching up, of things being not quite centered. No grids. Unpolished. Hand made.
I need to always be making things. Are you a maker?
We love the idea of using post-it notes to draw on, in lieu of nothing at all. We found this one especially to-the-point: read more…
The other day, we got a snail mail note from a friend. While snail mail is inself a rare gift these days, there was an added surprise. When we opened the envelope, a cascade of pressed flowers fell out. In addition to bringing a charming blast of ‘garden’ into the apartment, the flowers were like little symbols of care and regard; our friend had taken the time to press the flowers and thoughtfully include them in her note.
We loved it. Pressing flowers (and leaves) is easy: you pick them, dry them, press them sandwiched between clean sheets of paper in a thick heavy book. Time does the rest. (There’s a great visual how-to here.)
But really, this is about the possibilities for enclosing surprises in a note or letter, that give it a totally “other” dimension. read more…
Maria Robledo sent us a link to Under the Sun, Roy Arden’s brilliant visual blog, which we are fans of but hadn’t looked at in some time; there’s ALWAYS something compelling there. This time, we found a picture of women wearing wondrous head dresses made of wrapped fabric. ‘We need to be able to do that’ we thought, and looked up how to make fab hats with a piece of fabric. Here are two short, curiously charming how-to’s to set you on the path (with the women, above, as further inspiration for improvising…a LONG swath of striped fabric folded lengthwise and warpped overlappingly). read more…
It appears the table is one of those tantelizing design one-offs that would cost a fortune to buy. We’ve seen a number of iterations of the idea over the past few years. For us, it has the essential design flaw of regular-size Post-It notes: that awful yellow color.
So of course, we set about figuring out how to MAKE our own custom post-it table, with paper we like. Here are two approaches: read more…
. They are purportedly biodegradable lanterns are made out of rice paper, non-toxic wax and bamboo. Their wax “fuel cell” is essentially a candle which when lit, creates air currents that cause the paper lantern to fly into the air, as much as a mile high. 
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