One of our favorite blogs these days is Made by Joel, the toy and craft projects that artist Joel Henriques makes for his kids. He manages to make A LOT out of ‘nothing’: dollhouses out of Cheerios boxes, puppets from paper clips and cardboard, cities from paper. The thing that we love is how Joel’s creations affect our thinking. We find ourselves mentally applying his ideas and his spare, modernist sensibility to our grown-up lives, looking at ordinary stuff as art materials, and solutions. We want his paper dollhouse furniture made life-size……and wonder if the principle of slotted wood he uses in his toy animals could be used to make furniture, or a room screen..

….if we could use a sgraffito process – scratching a design in in a heavy layer of beeswax crayon color – on a wall…

…how we might apply the wonderful colors in his slotted building disks,

or even the disk themselves…

Joel makes sure to explain HOW to make his marvelous inventions – often including templates and drawings, like this plan for a backyard playhouse

…dig that door:

…we find ourselves learning about how things work, like how to use his favorite tools:

And we start thinking “yeah, we can do that”, imagining our big ideas…