Shortly after we reported on Manny Howard’s experience drying out his water-logged cellphone out by burying it in rice, Valerie Sims emailed us this report: Several weeks ago a minor water leak reached an old dictionary that has sentimental value for me. Within a few hours, a small amount of water had wicked up through…
Read Moresimple stacked salvaged wood side table
A quick glance of these paired photos on Emma’s blog made us unconsciously splice the two ideas together: ‘salvaged wood bedside or sofa side table’, we thought…fine idea. There is so much great salvaged wood around these days, that can be easily cut and stacked askew to great effect… Related posts: Blog Find: Daniel Hales…
Read Morethinking about structures from the inside out
We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames. “Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind…
Read Moreperfect little gift: cool usb flash drive ‘keys’
We have a whole list of things that fall under the heading of “Practical but Ugly”, and wonder why it can be so hard to find good-looking, affordable versions of certain everyday items…dish racks, for example, or file cabinets. USB Flash drives are one of those handy items whose ugliness we’ve marveled at and put…
Read Moreis creativity the enemy?
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an…
Read Moremake MORE of your own music
One of our favorite early posts was about Andre Michelle’s visual music synthesizer, ToneMatrix which allows you to instantly improvise your own music by selecting any of the small boxes on the grid on his website. We have turned to it many times when we wanted a diversion to shift our mood or view, or…
Read Morefaux brick concrete block wall
We love Nina Saltman‘s and her husband James Bullock‘s pun of a paint job at their house in San Francisco: faux brick painted on a concrete and block wall! Related post: We’re Back! (Let’s Paint a Wall)
Read Morewe’re back! (let’s paint a wall…)
We’ve spent the past ten days or so on the other side of the country, looking at everything but our laptops, and being nothing but lazy. Somehow doing NOTHING filled us up, gave us lots to think about and share… Like this sign we saw (when Nina said LOOK UP!) in Balmy Alley in San…
Read Moreturf dancing in the rain (we’ll be back next week)
Lately, we’ve been reading posts on some of our favorite blogs saying, in various ways, “we’re TIRED, burned out, so need to disappear for a while.” 2 or 3 Things I Know really nailed it: working in the creative field can be so demanding for design is quite personal …an extension of yourself. for me,…
Read Morecanal house cooking Vol. 4 for summer’s bumper crop
A bumper crop of summer vegetables, fruits and herbs might well take us into early October this year, and there is no more inspiring guide for enjoying it than Canal House Cooking Volume N°4. The indie cookbook series’ beautiful hardcover ‘Farm Markets & Gardens’ issue delves deeply into tomatoes, potatoes, herbs, the grill and cocktails,…
Read Moretart-o-matic…improvising fresh fruit tarts
Years ago, I learned a wonderfully simple method for making a rustic freeform fruit tarts modeled after French galettes, whose charm lies in their rustic imperfection. The recipe involves little more than rolling flaky pie dough into a rough free-form round, piling cut-and-sugared fruits into the middle, and folding the dough up around it. It…
Read Moretwitter in dire straits
Leigh Fazzina was lost in a 300-acre Connecticut wood, racing downhill on her mountain bike looking for the main road, when her front wheel hit a tree root. She flew over the handlebars and slammed into the ground, to find herself bloodied and unable to walk…and panicking. She tried screaming and calling for help on…
Read Moreemergency medicine
A few months ago, while I was clearing out a storage room in a lonely warehouse building, a friend called me on my cell phone in tears. She told me of the overwhelming fear and anxiety she was feeling about a trip she was to embark upon in a few hours, that held many potentially…
Read Moreps: how to transform a cardboard box
We wish every cardboard box we come across to look like this, which is, actually, an artwork by Hreinn Fridfinnsson. Being barbarians, we’d like to copy Fridfinnsson’s idea for our closet boxes…or, as an unexpected spin on a gift box: it would look ordinary and rather humdrum on the outside, but when the giftee pulls…
Read Morecardboard, crates + chairs as building materials
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined…
Read Mored-i-y aromatherapy baths + bath salts (cheap)
We couldn’t live without the occasional hot bath to cool-out our over-worked selves. Instead of buying expensive, wonderfully-packaged bath salts, “spa crystals” and oils, we came up with a simple formula for doctoring baths that involves no effort at all, is cheap, and allows us to calibrate really pure fragrances to our mood. We just…
Read Morea book + music (‘free play’ + ‘the koln concert’)
One of our favorite books about improvising is Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch. It’s one of those enduring books that you can open randomly and find something useful or compelling…like this, which we found just now: “…Sometimes we damn the limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide…
Read MoreMOMA’s photo wallpaper (a piece of ass)
Pamela Hovland‘s Comment in response to our recent wallpaper post is an amazing report from MOMA of a wallpaper installation that is so wonderfully described, hilarious and thoughtful, that we had to publish it here. And just as we were despairing of not being able to find any image like it on MOMA’s website, Pamela sent us…
Read More‘harness the power of being an idiot!’
Half awake this morning, a quote on O’Reilly Radar caught our eye: “Harness the power of being an idiot”. That’s for US, for sure! So we followed the link to PeteSearch, the blog of Pete Warden. He is a programmer, software engineer (including years at Apple), graphics researcher and serious technology guy (he’s developed an…
Read Moregrowth study (of ideas?)
One of designer Greg Saul’s Growth Studies.
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