Although we’ve always thought of ourselves as rather minimalist, we’ve been realizing that we have attachments to things that we don’t really want or need anymore, and have a hard time letting them go. What we are really attached to are the memories and associations the object spurs, afraid we’d lose the memory if we could never see the object again. As a solution, we started photographing things we wanted to let go of to create a digital archive of “Memory Stuff”. It freed us up to give stuff away.
Now we have a photo to remind us the tiny blue-gray pebbles we collected as we sat for hours on a beach near San Francisco talking to a friend many years ago…We don’t need to write anything down, because the memories are within us, called up instantly.
We discovered a variation of this strategy in a recent SwissMiss post called Eulogy of Stuff; it quoted a Comment left on an Apartment Therapy thread by a reader named slocumnavigator: read more…
Annaleena’s Hem recently published a whimsical “inspiration” wall, a styled visualization of a very practical process. She taped up clipped-from-magazine images of ideas for redecorating, and called it “Collect Your Dreams”. Says Annaleena:
Something I often say to…those who are renovating is to tear out pictures as you like, it can be inspirational images of colors, chairs, wallpaper samples or materials and place them in a binder. Then you have a frame to go to when all is said and done and you have to make choices.
We’ve recommended doing that very thing ourselves in past posts, though we’ve shifted our “notebook” largely from paper to virtual. Since we’re always scouting blogs and websites for ‘the improvised life’, we come across tons of visual ideas for our dream renovation. We just slide them into Evernote, a free software with which you can clip images, write notes to yourself, organize them any way we like, moving things around at will. (You can also sync it between computers and with your iPhone. When we’re out in the world, we sometimes take pictures of cool ideas with our iPhone, and send it to our Evernote). Here’s a couple of screen shots from our Renovation Notebook: read more…
We love this bed made of shipping pallets that the endlessly clever Swedish designer Maliin Stoor built for her daughters: a chain of LEDs illuminates it from underneath. Here are details, translated from Swedish (we hope accurately enough):
“Lights under the bed…Inspired by a hotel I recently stayed in…I bought a light chain and put it under the bed. (When we cast the concrete slab we made sure to fix a number of electrical plugs in the floors, even one under the bed. I felt smart!) The girls think it’s really nice and hoped that the loop shone all night, but the loop is set on a timer and is on from five o’clock to half-eleven; it works for us …” read more…
For years we’ve wondered why extension cords and power strips have to be SO ugly; we’ve secretly been waiting for an alternative that we won’t want have to hide under rugs or behind pictures propped on the floor. So we were thrilled to discover Multi Line, an almost perfect solution.
It’s essentially an extension cord that has plugs placed along the whole length rather than at just one end. It allows you to plug things in where you need them, leaving the vividly-colored cord exposed. Because it’s like a long, slender wire, it can be neatly arranged. It’s a cool looking thing unto itself. read more…
We never knew studs in clothes could look quite so wonderful until we stumbled on this picture of London’s Carnaby Street in 1966, the center of mod at the time. (If you’re tempted, Studs and Spikes has all you’ll need to get going.)
Years ago at a tag sale, we bought some ancient flower frogs, tiny spiked metal stands meant to hold flowers in a graceful arrangement. They are weighted so they won’t tip over. We never used them for flower arranging; instead we stuck pictures in them, for an impromptu, instantly changeable display.
We’ve had them on our list of things to photograph for ‘the improvised life’ and then stumbled on this image at the Etsy store of the wonderful blog French by Design. There, proprietor/blogger Si offers vintage treasures that she’s found. She has one lovely flower frog for sale, and some great ideas for using them: “as name cards for my formal table when we have guests… You can also collect them and use them as wedding centerpieces or to hold special photos.” read more…
We hadn’t realized how beautiful black masking tape could be – we actually hadn’t realized there WAS such a thing – until we saw it used to hang a poster on Annaleena’s Hem. The black takes it out of the realm of masking tape and into a bold, intentional, very cool, happily impermanent, unframed picture hanger. read more…
Even though we mostly give charity donations as our holiday gifts, we DO like giving a few more tangible gifts as well, ones that are not too pricey and give a big bang for the buck. So we’ve compiled our eclectic list of favorite things to give…and get.
In addition, on Friday we’ll be talking about some Homemade Food Gifts on public radio’s The Splendid Table (for last year’s food gifts, see the links below). And if you were to type “GIFTS” or “KIDS” into ‘the improvised life”s Search box, you’d find lots of gift possibilities we’ve written about over the past year and a half, from books to leather-welding-gloves-as-oven-mitts (not to mention my brilliant sister’s oddly brilliant gift ideas).
One of the most appreciated gifts we’ve given lately are these French paring knives with colorful painted handles, made by the venerable knife company L’Econome. They are inexpensive as paring knives go – about $10 each – and do what any good paring knife should: feel good in the hand, sharpen easily and stay sharp, look good, even as they age and weather. EVERYBODY needs a good paring knife. A green handled one is now the favorite knife of my friend Maria, who LOVES green. (We buy them in different colors to keep in our “gift” drawer, just in case.) read more…
It all got us wondering exactly how healthy it is to be putting ink on your skin more than occasionally; what exactly would your body be absorbing? There isn’t much solid info. According to WiseGeek, water-based inks are considered non-hazardous. Indelible/permanent inks definitely have quite a few potentially toxic chemicals.
You can always buy non-toxic tattoo markers and gel pens designed for kids and teenagers.
We been slow in adding essential information to the ‘the improvised life’s homepage (that will be there permanently one day): that we we’re tweeting the great quick improvisations we find, like this unbelievably beautiful Bauhaus cloth print designed on a typewriter, and this fabulous ‘do’ from Alexander McQueen read more…
We have a bad habit of scribbling notes on on 2-inch Post-Its, only to find ourselves in a sea of them: bits and pieces of information everywhere. The classic sizes of stickies that 3M offers don’t entirely work for us; we need repositionable notes that accommodate writing out a series of ideas. We love these oblong adhesive notes from the Poketo shop: big Desk-It notes can sit under your wrists as you type at your keyboard or you can stick them on the monitor.
So of course we’re thinking: rather than pay $8+ for a pad of sixty 11.8- x-2.7-inch-sheets, why not just cut ordinary 8 1/2 x 11-inch sheets of paper into 2 3/4-inch rectangles (or whatever size we like)? read more…
About a week ago, in our post about treadmill desks, we were bemoaning (and marveling at) the concerted ugliness of treadmill design, wondering how we could ever improvise a desk that would be pleasing to look at. Then we stumbled on Core 77′s amazing in-depth post of attempts to rethink the treadmill (with tons of photos, including bedrooms blighted by dreary gunmetal gray exercise machines).
Our favorite (though untested) is the Nautilus Mobia, which can work as a stair-master or a treadmill, or a sort of elliptical-style combo of the two. It looks GOOD and we’re thinking that its counter-like design might night need much of a hack to work at it…
Blogging is hard on us – not psychically – we love researching and discovery and sharing – but physically: our backs suffer from hours of sitting and we’re getting a little plump (many days, we’re hard-pressed to tear ourselves away to work out; before we know it, the day is GONE). Plus, we’ve been reading about how bad sitting for long periods is. Yeah, we know about getting up to stretch every hour, and doing tai chi, and …all the helpful things that we’re trying to get disciplined enough to do…
What we really wish is that there was a way to work while we work out: actually write and edit photos for our posts, not just read or listen to music. We decided to try out our fantasy of rigging a treadmill with a laptop, to make a treadmill desk. The idea is you walk slowly as you work, and over time, you cover a lot of ground, burn calories and moving your body really helps it. Why not? we thought.
We took a plywood board to the gym, placed it across the rails of a treadmill and set our laptop on it. Then we started walking, really slowly at first, while we got acclimated enough to actually open a document and write. It was pretty relaxing, felt good to be moving and standing rather than sitting…though not something we the management of our gym would let us do on a regular basis. But IF you had your own treadmill in your space, it would be a viable alternative…
We’ve discovered that other people have had the same idea. read more…
We had no idea we could laugh at will until we read The Laughing Guru in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Madan Kataria promotes Laughter Yoga, which he says can be a cure for all sorts of physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. We have a few of those, so we thought we’d try it. We wondered if laughing at will would just add up to a kind of false, phony-baloney laughter to dupe ourselves into thinking that things are fine when they’re not.
We found we COULD just laugh, and once we started, it was easy to keep going. Then we tried laughing with a friend on the phone (he had read the article and had been privately trying it out). We found ourselves laughing so hard we were holding our bellies. Forced laughing, when done with other people, soon becomes real laughing, like some wild and beneficial virus. We discovered that laughing has a strange effect, a REAL effect totally different than we were imagining. It seems to short-circuit anxiety and shift the view immediately. Try it for yourself!
Says Kataria: “Laughter is a choice. A connector of people. No barriers. No language.”
In this YouTube video, 250 people came together at dawn in Mumbai, to LAUGH like crazy. read more…
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designed for kids and teenagers.
