The last “turning” hydrangeas from Maria Robledo‘s garden made the perfect instant flower arrangement for the table… …here’s another of Maria’s arrangements made with branches of leaves and some yellow flower that looks like an undersea creature…(dig the fabulous nude by Sofia Rower in the background)…
Read More‘life edited’ challenge: ‘less but better’
Life Edited is a movement to reduce our environmental impact by simplifying our lives at home. In this short video, Treehugger founder Graham Hill sums up its challenge to rethink how you live, to reduce your footprint, to live better and save money and resources. He asks “What if I lived in a couple of…
Read Morehappy halloween!!!!! (2010)
We’re knocked out by these Katchina costumes made in 1922 by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Swiss artist, and wife of artist Jean Arp, with whom she collaborated during their long marriage… via the great, illuminating blog Rolu
Read Moremalted milk 101 + recipe: chocolate malted pudding
“I keep drinking malted milk, trying to drive my blues away…” –Robert Johnson, Delta Blues Guitar Legend,1937 Although malted milk powder has been a staple in my pantry for many years, I didn’t actually know what it was until recently. I was making a batch of chocolate malted pudding and suddenly wondered what this homely,…
Read Moremakedo plastic connectors (for improvised halloween costumes and ..)
Makedo is a set of simple plastic connectors for creating things from the stuff around you, like cardboard, plastic and fabric. This little video gives the inspiring gist, as does Makedo’s image galleries in many categories: creatures, structures (our favorite…there’s even a boat), domestic bliss, vehicles. And for Halloween, check out these cool costumes:
Read Morewhat if sherlock holmes were alive today?
We were riveted by the first episode of the BBC’s clever adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, set in 2010. Sherlock is as brilliant, eccentric and surprising as he should be, with lots of thrilling outside-the-box thinking. PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery will be airing three 90-minute episodes of Sherlock. (Check the site for airing times in…
Read Morewhy not?: d-i-y treadmill desk
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…
Read Moreone thing ALWAYS leads to another: from ‘revolutionary yardscape’ to the campana bros astonishing website
Sometimes we are just completely knocked out by the connections of ideas and people we make daily writing ‘the improvised life’. Like Matthew Levesque, a reader from San Francisco who runs Building Resources, a not-for-profit depot of re-usable and re-manufactured materials for building and landscaping…. …who wrote a book we want called: The Revolutionary Yardscape: Ideas…
Read Mored-i-y shipping pallet wine rack + flat storage
Last week’s Remodelista post about the shipping pallet shelving Olabisi Winery’s devised for their tasting room opened our eyes to an essential quality of shipping pallets we had overlooked: stacked, they make instant flat storage. Pallets are only about 5 inches high, with a natural space for bottles (wine, soda, olive oil – anything) or flat items…
Read Morepatti smith’s (+ ancient chinese) smile therapy
We had just finished writing the post on Laughter Yoga when we remembered an interview punk rocker Patti Smith gave to The New York Times Magazine. She outlined her personal “smile therapy,” evolved to ease the pain of a rough life. “Do you ever feel lonely?” the interviewer asked. “Sometimes the pain still — the…
Read Moremadan kataria’s laughter yoga: laughing as a practice
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…
Read Moregraphing novels, business plans and other big ideas
Ever since we blogged a whiteboard-painted wall for tracking ideas and next steps, we’ve been coming across examples of graphed ideas. This is J.K. Rowlings plot spreadsheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It knocked us out for how utterly straightforward and unfussy it is; written in ball-point pen on lined notebook…
Read Morerules for living: just one from pablo picasso
Sometimes, we have so much to do, so many things pulling at us, that we don’t know what to do first. We’ve been trying out a new very simple guideline that we read recently; It’s a quote from Pablo Picasso: “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” We…
Read Moreceiling task light redux: the mother of all task lights
When we wrote about suspending task lights from the ceiling, we never imagined THIS possibility: the spider-like mother-of-all-task-lights designed by Ron Giliad for Moooi. It’s available at Modern Light for about $4,000, OR you could buy sixteen adjustable task lights for about $20 each and rig one. (Even if you had an iron-worker make the…
Read Morescribble scrabble wigwag walls (a perfect playroom for kids or adults)
We found this image of artist Otto Zitko’s work “destiny of the line” on You Have Been Here Sometime. What a swell playroom it would make.
Read Morecould you live as a ‘no impact man/woman’
Pamela Hovland alerted us to a film to add to our list of must-see’s: “No Impact Man”, a documentary about a NYC guy and his reluctant family to eliminate their impact on the environment for a year…They MUST have needed to improvise daily/hourly in order to keep up their commitment. Check out the trailer…” Yikes!…
Read Moreworktable made with upside-down sawhorses?
We were looking at this photo of a work table of artist Dieter Roth on display Hauser & Wirth gallery, admiring its design, and its sculptural base…and started to wonder if those V-shaped supports were not simply upside-down wooden sawhorses affixed to a slab of plywood.
Read Moredieter roth’s workspace + the courage to ‘leave crap the way it is’
We originally planned to post this image of artist Dieter Roth’s studio with little comment just because we find it illuminating to see how creative people work, what their spaces look like. Then we stumbled on the story behind this image clipped from the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago, in a…
Read Morehow to find a hidden solution
…Another amazing post from Anne Herbert at Peace and Love and Noticing the Details. Whether you believe in God, or some sort of higher power, or not, she really got the gist: …the solutions that we are so sure are the right ones or the only ones, often aren’t…best to not insist, because we just…
Read Morebenoit mandelbrot on life as a very crooked line
The internet is awash in gorgeous videos like this one honoring – and illustrating – mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s mind-expanding research into fractals, rough geometric shapes, whose pattern splits into reduced copies of the whole, over and over. (That is our fumbling attempt at a description and doesn’t begin to tell you why they are important).…
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