The other day, we stumbled on Dargelos, an online store with stylish, thoughtfully-designed products for bicycle riders (some are great for NON bikers as well). We originally went to the site to check out their Lighting Vest, a hand-netted safety vest made from a specially-developed reflective 3M material that will make you highly visible to motorists (i.e. safe.) It is lightweight, can fit in your pocket and layer over just about anything you want to wear. It’s so great looking, we could imagine wearing it just for the hell of it.
While on Dargelos’ site, we discovered many other cool things… read more…
On a recent Selby visit, we spotted this fabric-draped sofa in the wonderful home of Hitoshi Uchida-san – owner of J’Antiques Tokyo (check out the full story). The beauty of it is that the sofa is covered with a really big swath of fabric that can bunch and drape luxuriously. The fabric is wide enough to go from the floor in front of the sofa, over the seat, up the back and hang over by a couple of feet – not something the usual 54-inch width of fabric can do. But where do you find affordable fabric like this? read more…
Our friend Linnae recently introduced us to Pat Ludwig, a “self-taught quilter” who blogs all of her projects so you can see the full process of making a quilt start-to-finish. Patwig’s quilts are made exclusively from old fabric scraps, including khaki and denim pants, childhood dresses, curtains, neckties, bedsheets, and even seat cushions.
Her two most recent quilts are particularly interesting. They started out as 35+ button-down men’s shirts, given to Ludwig by a woman whose husband had passed away years before. She wanted her grandchildren to have a piece of the grandfather they had never met and commissioned Patwig to turn his shirts into the Nine Patch and Log Cabin quilts.
We love everything about this, from repurposing old materials into fantastic and functional art projects, to the very idea of a memory quilt. Quilts and blankets are attached to so many comforting and visceral childhood memories; having one made of materials that remind you of family or friends strikes us as a powerful way to remain connected to someone’s presence (even in their absence).
When You Have Been Here Sometime recently posted some images from Architectural Digest, New York Interiors, 1979, we were struck by this one. Although lamps and pouf and carpet are all pretty dated and rigid, a great idea remains: covering a homely piece of furniture with beautiful fabric. Who knows what’s under the ochre yellow panel? It could be two horizontal file cabinets placed end to end for all we know. Layering fabrics adds substance and a mix of textures and colors. The fabric covers don’t HAVE to be hemmed: intentionally ripped linen can be beautiful… read more…
We’re always on the lookout for inexpensive housewares that LOOK expensive and stylish. We think these cotton Vilmi Figur pillow covers from Ikea do just that. Throw pillows can be crazy amazingly expensive, so at $10 each (inserts $2.99 to $6.99), these are a bargain (and wash and wear to boot). There’s a jazzy contrasting polka dot version from the same line. read more…
For some time now, we’ve struggled with the plastic bag problem. Not shopping bags – we’ve got that figured – we just carry a cute fold-up bag in our everyday bag. We’re talking plastic food bags. What is a really feasible bag for collecting messy things like bunches of grapes, piles of cherries or loose mesclun from the market? It needs to not take much room so we can take a bunch with us on our daily forays out, AND be washable.
Artist Ethan Greenbaum‘s work gave us lots of idea for home works made of concrete block. He has figured out ways to make them seem both light and somehow charming, by using plasticine and colored acrylics instead of cement as grout. Plasticine is a kind of clay that won’t harden so maybe it actually IS a good idea for certain homemade pieces where you don’t want the commitment of concrete, or it’s permanence. We love the idea of painting the cement grouting with Greenbaum’s whimsical colors, to transform a dreary block wall.
We also love Greenbaum’s plasticine-covered block structures; although the always-soft plasticine might not be feasible in the long run, it makes us wonder what would be: what could we coat concrete blocks with to give them a surprising and less heavy look, while preserving blocks’ elemental form ? And his idea of combining blocks of different sizes is a revelation, making us see ever more possibilities for “random” assemblages of concrete blocks as table bases, bed platforms, odd storage units… read more…
In Lookbook 54, artists Emily Larned and Roxane Zargham created 54 different improvisations on one XL white t-shirt, using common household supplies (binder clips, safety pins, duct tape) as styling aids. They set serious constraints for themselves: The shirt is never cut or permanently altered, and all the accessories serve a function.
In their singular work, they seek to answer the question:
“What is the most reductive form that can yield the most variety in meaning? Possibly the white t-shirt. Tight it is James Dean, huge it is hip hop. It’s not what you wear, it’s how you wear it.”
They expand the view of what’s possible in the realm of ordinary t-shirt. read more…
Like the website Knock-Off in Style, we love the challenge of finding an affordable version of some great piece of design – not necessarily a “knock-off” but an object of similar lines and intention, that is cheap. We’ve loved this wool Ikea PS Stuga rug (9′ x 9′, $299) from the moment we saw it, but think it’s even more of a value since we saw this printed dhurrie by John Robshaw (6′ x 9′, $795) featured on Better Living Through Design: read more…
At Mill Valley Beerworks in California, they use .49 red-striped cotton Tekla dishtowels from Ikea as cloth napkins. They are reminiscent of classic French provincial tea towels. You can’t get any cheaper than that for a good-looking resource that invites improvisation: placemats, gift wrapping…stitched-together to become a pillow cover or… mapped with stripes going horizontally and vertically to make a curtain or tablecloth…. read more…
Whenever we need a business card to introduce ‘the improvised life’ or ourselves (with address and phone), we peel off a printed-at-our-local-copy-shop sticker and stick it onto…something. Pamela Hovland dreamed up the idea one day when we were trying to figure out an alt-business card that would say what ‘the improvised life’ is in a flash, and get people curious enough to go to the site. We began to imagine things that would be cool made into cards, like the oddly-printed discards and tests that printers routinely put in the recycling bin, or cereal boxes…or leather, bits of fabric, thin sheets of metal, used subway cards. Our favorite so far is the ribbon we bought at Hyman Hendler in the garment district, that we originally bought to make the ribbon on the Surprise Box. read more…
What is it that we love about this? This wrap job is a whole OTHER thing than a mover would do. The use of twine and rope, akimbo, along with the fine lines of the unseen table (which could be made out of anything), turned it into a sculpture. We’re filing that in our heads for future “transformations” we might try on a piece of furniture we’re tired of, or that need something.
Sometimes there’s no way around keeping a piece of furniture in your place that you’re not crazy about; you either need it (like a file cabinet or storage chest) or you can’t get rid of it just yet (you’re keeping it for the next place). Here’s an example of using a great fabric to hide a piece of furniture, from the fabulous house designed by the great Mexican architect Luis Barrigan that we blogged last week. Laying fabric upon wonderful fabric on the table and folding the corners in neatly makes it look interesting and intentional, rather than like a disguise (though we don’t imagine Barrigan is disguising anything in that house.)
We think, the example from Lonny Magazine, below, works pretty well, though it transmits subtle inklings of “disguise”. We think it would have been much more complete with another piece of fabric, or a runner (even placed front to back) draped over it, a la Barrigan.
Makeshift is a wonderfully expressive term for “making a shift”: shifting your thinking to come up with a creative solution that accomplishes the task at hand in a unexpected way. When you find you don’t have something you need, you improvise a substitute or “shift” what you are making to accommodate it. Makeshift is one of our favorite words.
So, of course, we LOVE the blog Makeshift, which documents the daring, ambitious art-and-research project of Natalie Purschwitz. For an entire year starting September 1, 2009, she’s wearing ONLY things she has made herself: clothes, socks, shoes, underwear, coats, jackets, hats, bathing suits, accessories, and…
“….anything else I might need to protect my body from the elements while trying to lead a fulfilling life. It will be an investigation into the relationships between ‘clothing’, ‘making’ and ‘living’.”
Even her shoes! We can’t begin to imagine the amount of work and thought that goes into each day’s outfit but we love seeing the results: everyday a new picture of her standing there forthrightly in her new outfit. We also love seeing the evolution of ideas, some of which Purschwitz writes about…like these amazing yellow shoes, which evolved out of a technique for making Christmas ornaments: read more…
