Even during the holidays, big unexpected LIFE keeps happening. We’ll be taking a couple of weeks off to ride some big changes into the New Year. We’ll see you for sure on January 6, if not before. In the meantime, we’re sending huge gratitude to you for being part of Improvised Life, and warm wishes…
Read MoreThe Festive Funk Machine: Make Your Own Holiday Music
Sometimes the crazed “festive” holiday thing has the opposite effect: bringing on the blues. If you’re feeling a bit low, we recommend the sweet, fun Festive Funk Machine. Click on any of the robots to start making your own music…add in or “mute” any of the instruments — from violins and bells to baselines and percussion…
Read MoreGetting Ready for Christmas Day via Paul Simon
(Video link here.) Paul Simon’s ‘Getting Ready For Christmas Day‘* seems like a fitting ALT song for the run up before Christmas. It’s upbeat, secular, a tad political, full of social commentary and interwoven with excerpts from a 1941 sermon by the Rev. J.M. Gates, an influential preacher and Gospel singer. There’s also a lot of things leaping…
Read MoreWondrous: The Interactive World Wind Map
We wish we could embed this interactive wind map right on Improvised Life. You can see the wind whirling and flowing anywhere on Earth you choose, and around the whole earth at any given time, the constant that touches us all. The invisible wind is made visible, and wondrous. (We’re also thinking this would make…
Read MoreDraw Your Holiday Tree with Chalk or Pastels
Every year, we celebrate the theme of alternative, stres-reducing ways to experience the holidays. If you’ve got a chalkboard painted wall OR slab of wood, or a huge sheet of paper (we’re thinking our big roll of Kraft paper we keep on hand) you can draw a tree or ANYTHING in chalk or pastels. Here’s some inspiration.
Read MoreNicoise and Other Black Olives with Fragrant Rosemary Oil
Here’s another of our holiday recipe strategies: black olives that we’ve doctored up with fragrant homemade rosemary oil. We serve them as an instant hors d’oeuvre with chilled wine or cocktails AND pack them into glass jars to give as gifts. The method is simple.
Read MoreEmily Dickinson: Writing on Whatever Was At Hand
We were surprised to learn that the great poet Emily Dickinson often wrote her poems on whatever scraps of paper were on hand: envelopes, a household memo, the back of a Western Union telegram. The fragments of salvaged paper that held her astonishing poems —many of them experimental work — have been collected in the…
Read Morea holiday tree made of stacked vintage books
We can totally relate to Midcenturyjo of Style Files‘ complaint that she’s having a hard time wrapping her head around the fact that Christmas is next week. Her response was to fashion a holiday tree out of vintage books, another fab alt-tree for our collection.
Read MoreVirtual Gift Cards That Do Good AND Deliver Your Best Wishes
Long ago we started to unhook from obligatory — and often stressful — holiday gift buying. We became big fans of giving money to a charity in friends’ names, instead of the usual gift that nobody needs. Every year, we send charity gift cards, VIRTUALLY, a website that allows you to design your own cards (to a degree) and then send them in a sort of digital envelope that the recipient gets to open online.
Read More3 Simple Life Principles from Arthur Ashe
We love that improvising is at the heart of the tennis champ Arthur Ashe’s three principles.
Read MoreEver-Improvised Driftwood Cabin Somewhere in CA
(Video link here.) We spotted this lovely driftwood cabin at the great, always-refreshing, Cabin Porn; it is in an undisclosed location somewhere on the Northern California coast, there for people walking on the beach to come upon. The cabin stands to this day and good-hearted travelers continue to make small improvements. This video provides a…
Read MoreMore Minimalist Holiday Decorations
Years ago we started moving our holidays toward minimalist, in part to unhook from some of the frenetic (and stressful) activity of the season. Decoration-wise, we put a few elements around that makes us feel the season without being a big deal: some fragrant pine branches from a friend’s farm, some beautifully sculptural ornaments from…
Read MoreJuno Spacecraft’s View: Me and You on Earth, the Moon Around Us
We love this gif and video of what the Juno Spacecraft saw from a distance of 600,000 miles when it the passed Earth about six weeks ago, and what it/we would look like from a visitor afar. A perfect perspective to start the day.
Read MoreLeaping Lebkuchen Bauhaus Style
Leave it to the Bauhaus to put their unique design sense to Lebkuchen, the traditional German Christmas cookies similar to gingerbread.
Read MoreWorld Knives on L’Econome Paring Knives and Our Readers
After a run on the great L’Econome paring knife, World Knives has informed us that they have big stock of the endlessly useful, ages-wonderfully knife, in many colors. They also had some comments about our readers.
Read MoreMinimalist Holiday Decor: Paper Cut-Out Holiday Tree?
We’re thinking how nice this tree would be on a wall. We envision just cutting the shapes out of big sheets of colored (or painted) paper and tacking them on the wall. Swell.
Read MoreIn Newtown, a Makeshift Memorial from Random Acts of Kindness
Waking up on the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut, we found this this article about the ways that some residents in the town are choosing to memorialize the event: In the absence of an official memorial, residents here have been memorializing the victims on a daily basis…
Read MoreIdeas for Improvising: Cool DIY Holiday Garlands + Decorations
Images of christmas garlands made by school kids in Cuba (below) made us think of the materials at hand for making something pretty. That sent us imagining and hunting around, and we found a trove of possibilities, offered here just to spur your imagination.
Read Moreglass jars for homemade food gifts
Where do you get the jars to pack your juice homemade food gifts in? We have three strategies: collect them over the year (soak the labels off nice-looking jars some other food has come in), buy vintage jars at flea markets and thrift stores OR buy them. Here’s our compendium of great looking affordable jars.
Read MoreEasy Holiday Hack: All-in-One Greeting Card + Envelope
We excerpted the one perfect trick for the holidays from Grant Thompson’s 10 Life Hacks You Need To Know For Christmas!: a way of folding paper so you can send it without an envelope. Voila! Instant holiday greetings.
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