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…
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. Lambchop transforms the ugly fence —we find we don’t even notice the fence— into an illuminating message. read more…
When we saw this image featured under Bedrooms on a design blog, we instantly thought: what a great solution for jazzing up a place, like the drab walls of a rental studio a friend is struggling to make into a home, however temporary. We started looking into services that make wall murals, imagining cool images from ourarchive wrought BIG.
First we came across Murals Your Way, a service will make any high-resolution image you have into a 6-x-4-foot mural on canvas, fabric-backed vinyl or a repositionable material. If you planned it right, you could forge a really huge mural by seaming together smaller panels. Murals Your Way’s faq gives a sense of what’s possible, and there are A LOT of possibilities.
Then when we were hunting around for the photo credit for the bedroom image, above, we discovered that the mural came from Pixers, a company that sells bespoke wall murals read more…
When we first saw the yellow freehand painted two-tone wall at Style-Files (below), we were of two minds: good idea but something held us back.
Then we came started to come across an iteration Remodelista found at the Norwegian company Lady Premium Paint & Colors blog that made us think it held lots of possibilities. Out-of-the-blue we spotted the freehand-by-brush two-tone painted iPad sleeve (below) at Swiss-Miss. We began to think imagine embellishing all sorts of things with free-hand two-tone paint, like pillows a la Wary Meyers… read more…
Recently we’ve been noodling around with the idea of with making a Murphy Bed with a lift-system of bungee cords. We haven’t heard of such a thing, but having seen the realm of industrial bungees available, thought it might be possible.
Then, with the simultaneity we’ve come to expect when we have an idea, we stumbled on some images of beautiful bungee cord chairs designed by René Herbst, a contemporary of Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier, in the 1930′s. They illustrated the part of our idea that had been eluding us: how to make our improvised solution be visually appealing as well as practical, two qualities we strive for in all of our home improvisations (travel and emergencies are another matter): read more…
Just as we posted about the many possibilities for using plywood as a wall covering, we learned of this brilliant play on the idea: moveable MAGNETIC silkscreened tiles made out of plywood. They are the brainchild of Giovanna and Matt Taylor, a couple who had never designed before. Remembering the blue-and-white ceramic tiles of her Italian childhood, Giovanna imagined lightweight wooden tiles with magnetic backing would allow for endless applications and arrangements from wall art, to back splashes to headboards to….The couple started making them in their Brooklyn shop and Moonishco was born. read more…
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…
Two images spotted on Japanese Trash recently opened our eyes to the possibility of using geometic cuts of plywood veneers as a wall covering. Ah, no, on closer inspection, the fireplace surround above appears to be stone…but it COULD be done with plywood…
Why not?
To get a sense of range of possibilities, we recommend read more…
Recently, a friend mentioned her attempt to paint her wooden kitchen cabinets white using latex paint. Several months after she’d completed them, they’d yellowed and were difficult to clean. We’ve heard that complaint before about latex-painted furniture, and experienced the way it can remain “sticky”, a serious problem with bookshelves. We’d always thought that oil-base paint was the only serious solution. Fortuitously, Jim Dillon, a reader and cabinet maker, had just commented on our ‘the magic of an orange table top + high gloss oil paint‘ post, sharing a water-base solution he’d discovered in his furniture-painting forays.
…it was one of those techniques that I heard about in passing and tried out because it met the needs of the moment – - I had a client who wanted me to build new built-in bookcases and paint them white. Somebody told me this was the solution to books sticking to painted bookcases in August humidity, and it worked too well to not try in other places.
Been carving them since 1980 when our house burned down, and only my studio was saved. All four of us all lived in that one room for a while, and the only art I could make was something small, low tech, and cleanuppable: ink, paper, and stamps. After buying some commercial ones, carving erasers was a natural move, and proved effective therapy for the kids, who spent many hours stabbing away at erasers, and swabbing with colored markers, retelling their stories of the fire illustrated with the stamps. The neighborhood kids all got into the act, too. It was a lively time!
When your house burns down, make art!!!! An amazing point of view. read more…
We thought we were so smart when we thought to blog about the hacks we’d imagined for Ikea’s Löbbo shade, which is basically a sheet of polypropylene that you form into a drum and secure with metal struts; it can be placed on a lamp base or hung from a pendant. It comes in various sizes, but we bought several of the biggest with the idea of using the sheets of polypropylene — which is pretty heat-proof —as a RAW MATERIAL with which to fashion all sorts of shades, using our trusty exacto knife. (We’ve been searching for readily-available shade materials for years.)
First thing we planne was to tailor the Löbbo shade we’ve got on a standing lamp: slice off a 2 or 3 inches from the drum-like shade to give it a more sleek, retro look. Then we’d go to town playing with the remaining sheets of Löbbo polypropylene we have, to fashion some sort of scultpural pendant light, like this one we found at Ouno: read more…
(Video link here.) We’re sometimes leary of the trend of making useful things our of ANYTHING because the object made are often so homely. We find ourselves inspired by French Designer Pierre Lota’s video introduing his video series 1 Object in 1 Minute. His assemblages of coat hangers, paper, and spoons have a strong design sense, and his videos show them to be do-able. What the video’s really do is encourage us to see visually-appealing, useful possibilities for ordinary materials and realize we could, with patience and perhaps some experimenting, do them ourselves.
One of our favorites: a spoon bent into a hook you can rest on a table to keep your handbag off the dirty floor of a restaurant, read more…
A slab of wood on a repurposed base made fab by the orange lacquer surface: the miracle of high gloss paint.
The secret to getting truly shiny high gloss is to use oil base (alkyd) paint. When we did side-by-side tests of high gloss alkyd and water-base latex paint we made a big discovery: the latex doesn’t shine or reflect nearly as much as the Alkyd. On a table, it will be prone to waterspotting and staining.
For those who are adverse to using alkyd paint, we wondered if you could use latex paint and seal it with a high gloss polyeurathane. We asked a friend who seems to know everything about paints and fine fixes for interiors. He said: read more…
. Lambchop transforms the ugly fence —we find we don’t even notice the fence— into an illuminating message. 
