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…
After I had figured out the essential plan of the multi-functional space that was to become my home and ‘the improvised life’s Laboratory, I started bringing friends by to get their opinions and input. I also hired an interior designer to consult for a short time, to consider my ideas, challenge them, add to them, as well as help source the many items I would need, from sinks and plumbing fixtures to door knobs. Hiring a consultant for a fixed amount of time is a good strategy if you you’re don’t have the resources to hire a someone to see the project though, or don’t need start-to-finish service.
I met Scott McFarlane through friends and liked ideas he’d come up with for their recent renovation, as well as his attention to detail. Although I have a strong design sense, it was clear that there was A LOT of things I could use advice on. I hired Scott to consult on critical elements of my plan so architect Emily Johnson could draw up plans that contractors would understand. Scott and I spent many hours in the empty apartment busting holes in walls, tacking up images I’d clipped from design blogs, measuring, brain-storming.
Scott came up with A LOT of clever solutions to some extreme design problems (all pictures below are from the in-process days of the reno). For starters, read more…
Even though it’s not our fault, the vast amounts of junk mail we get makes us feel frustrated and guilty. So much paper going to waste. Try and warp your head around this: the Wall Street Journal reports that 82.5 billion pieces of “advertising mail” were delivered by the U.S. Postal system in 2010.
Years ago there was an internet service that would alert catalog companies that you wanted to opt-out, although it seems to have disappeared. But Unconsumption has just alerted us to a next-generation service that might do something similar. PaperKarma is a new app (for iPhones, androids, and Windows phones) will contact the source of your junk mail and “remove you from their mailing list.” All you have to do is a take a photo of the piece of junk mail in question. The key is to take a picture that highlights the name of the company sending the mail, like in the photo below. read more…
After reading two recent post referring to out-of-print books like Calder at Home and How to Construct Reitveld Furniture, a long-time reader emailed us a great strategy for finding affordable books online using “favorite searches” on ABE books. Check out her message below to hear how it works. We are going to try setting up searches for some hard-to-find books:
…when you are looking for a used book that seems too expensive, you should try ABE books. You can save searches (including advanced searches, e.g., by price, year, ISBN numbers if you want a particular edition, hardback or paperback, etc) and they send you an email you when any book fitting those parameters come for sale on to the used book market—sort of like a favorite search on ebay, keeping you from having to constantly check if a new, cheaper copy has become available. Many of the used book vendors on amazon are simultaneously selling on ABE (stands for Advanced Book Exchange).
I find it great for books that I would like to get to one day, and so am in no rush to buy (and most of my books I get from the library anyway), or that are out of print, etc.
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…
We find ourselves spending a lot of time sifting through product review websites as we try to make smart purchases. This can be a tedious process, and often we end up more unsure of what we’re looking for than when we started. That’s why we were really excited to discover The Wirecutter ,”a list of only great technology”. Run by Brian Lam, a former Gizmodo and Wired writer, the site lists “the best” in gadgets, from phones and TVs to cables and wireless music, to vacuum cleaners and electric toothbrushes.
We came across the site while researching portable hard drives, and really loved the layout of Lam’s reviews.Lam names the Lenovo Thinkpad USB 3.0 Secure Hard Drive as the best, but gives a thorough explanation of his choice and offers a couple of cheaper options that he still recommends. At the end of his write-ups, he includes a list of the “best sources” on his product choices, so you have easy access to a few other reputable reviews and his evaluation process.
Best of all, we like the way he thinks. read more…
We recently stumbled on a cool Japanese site that will instantly transmute any photo you upload to an aged version “like over 100 to 150 years old.”
On the upper right corner of the site you can ‘English’ to see a translation. You choose the file where it says to, and then click the blue box below it to upload. Wait a minute and you’ll your photo transformed.
The photo above is the vintage-ized version of this one we took of Palais Royale in Paris a couple of years ago:
Like everyone we know, we have a growing pile of books that we’ve been wanting to sell, to cut down on clutter and make a few bucks in the process. We recently discovered BookScouter, a website that tells you how much your used books are worth to a variety of online retailers.
The best part is that they pay for shipping (book rate) and provide labels, making selling books fairly simple—you just have to pack them up and drop them off when you are making a trip to the post office. We decided to test the process out to see if it’s really that easy. If you’re looking to sell, here’s the deal, start to finish: read more…
(Video link here.) Ekso Bionics, creators of a robotic exoskeleton that enables paraplegics to walk, has created a compelling video about their remarkable invention. Much of the video is of Amanda Boxtel, an early product tester, who has not walked since she sustained an spinal cord injury 20 years ago (though she has mastered – and taught – many sitting-down sports.) Watching her, and listening to her speak of her experience, is to be reminded of – and really “get” - the little ordinary things that we take for granted…“putting my heal on the ground…being able to bend my knee..taking a step and then another step…a walk in nature.”
(Video link here.) I tend to have mixed feelings about the growing number of options for social networking. I’ve definitely noticed my own reliance on social networks making me a little more self-indulgent and a little less personal in my communications with friends. But the power of social networking sites to create communities for people greatly in need of them never ceases to amaze me. Case in point: I Had Cancer, a social networking site for folks who have been diagnosed with or survived cancer and their loved ones. It was created/improvised by a cancer survivor, responding to the need she saw around her, and that she herself had experienced. And because everyone is touched in some way by cancer, dealing with it themselves, or knowing someone who is. read more…
Even though many of us are on email all day, there is absolutely no substitute for coming home to an actual letter or postcard you can hold in your hand. We recently tried out Postcardly, a service that melds our online lives with the magic of good old-fashioned mail. You upload a photo or graphic, add a message, supply the address, and Postcardly prints and delivers your postcards. We sent ourselves one of our graphic signs, and a photo from Ellen Silverman’s wonderful Cuban Kitchen archive. They took a week to arrive, but we were pleased enough with the quality, especially with photos. You can send an image directly from your phone, turning a snapshot into an instant postcard.
This is a great way to drop a line to someone who doesn’t use email, but it’s also a neat way to keep the printed photograph alive. Since getting a digital camera, we rarely print photos. But it used to be fun to give a friend a photograph they could tape on the wall and have on hand to look back to. read more…
Recently, we came a cross an old hard drive that we had swapped out of a computer long ago; who knows what revealing bits of information were on it? We searched the internet to learn how to dispose of a hard drive without leaving ourselves open to industrious hackers. We could either wipe it clean by ways that were way beyond our competence or…DESTROY IT. A friend of ours took it onto the street and smashed it to bits on the sidewalk using a $9 hammer we’d bought on Amazon. She returned with the twisted wreck, which had become was curiously beautiful…an inadvertent sculpture. read more…
Marc Chagall‘s grand daughter Bella Meyer got a Doctorate in medieval art history from the Sorbonne and has held a variety of jobs – designing props for the theater, working as a puppeteer – before stumbling on her true calling: floral design. After friends asked her to design a blossom-laden chuppah for their wedding, Meyer, who had always drawn and painted, realized that flowers are her medium…”in their variety and richness, they’re natural art supplies.”
In 2003, she started Fleurs Bella as a floral design company; two years ago, it morphed into a bricks-and-morter shop near New York City’s Union Square. Heres an bit of her compelling story recently published on Tablet:
“Cut flowers,” she says, “have no other purpose aside from being given.” She always keeps a stash just outside the shop, with a sign that says “take one please.” About once a month, she ventures out onto the streets with what she calls “flower graffiti,” tucking small bouquets into alleyways or subway stations. Occasionally she’ll thrust her flowers at random strangers. Not everyone is thrilled. She recalls one man who yelled at her: “I don’t want to be happy!”
Flower graffiti! Such a wonderful idea: a guerilla florist. Downtown Express called her a “flower vigilante” for her unique strategy: read more…
Our friend Charlie Allenson had a big birthday a few days ago, and we had big plans to give him a shout out that day and find ourselves, THE DAY AFTER, having been swept away by..everything. Damn. Charlie’s at the jazz festival in New Orleans so we thought we’d publish some of the very cool photos he sent us when he was in Vietnam recently. They are right up our alley of totally, seriously, charmingly improvised LIFE that seems to happen everywhere there, like the floating villages of Ha Long Bay. This house, above, appears to be floating on oil drums and styrefoam block. There is no supermarket; a market boat makes regultrips to each floating house.
Usually when we’ve wanted to figure out the right color to paint a room, we’ve bought samples and painted swatches right on the wall. This method works pretty well if you are only choosing ONE color. But what if you want to use several or many colors in a room or throughout the house? We love this strategy that location agent Andrea Reisfeld and photographer William Abranowicz posted on their blog A +B See, after they consulted with color-genius Eve Ashcraft, whose advised the likes of Martha Stewart on paint colors:
“We bought sample sizes of all 17 options, and painted them on sheets of mason board which had been primed with white.
Now, we can place the colors in their proper rooms throughout the house, and see how they work against the floor color choices and against rooms within the same sightlines. We’ll be able to see how the colors look in the light of our house, bright days, dark days and night time.”
It is SUCH a good idea, allowing you to move colors around at will.
Read more about Andrea and Bill’s big color changes here. You’ll find lots of color and other inspiration at Ashcraft’s blog Studio Horn.
