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 ‘Serendipity Rising’
When we were in Santa Cruz recently, a friend dragged us to a giant shopping mall. In no time, our senses were overwhelmed by TOO MUCH: stuff for sale, Cinnabon and Starbuck’s smells, piped music, people. Stumbling on the new Lego store made it all worth while. We loved its giant wall of help-yourself bins of Legos: we could buy the exact amount of whatever color(s) we wanted. Since we naturally seem to lean toward the monochromatic, we started imagining all the things we would devise with white Legos (maybe with one orange one stuck in to mess it up a little), or maybe these hot green ones… read more…
Whenever we need a business card to introduce ‘the improvised life’ or ourselves (with address and phone), we peel off a printed-at-our-local-copy-shop sticker and stick it onto…something. Pamela Hovland dreamed up the idea one day when we were trying to figure out an alt-business card that would say what ‘the improvised life’ is in a flash, and get people curious enough to go to the site. We began to imagine things that would be cool made into cards, like the oddly-printed discards and tests that printers routinely put in the recycling bin, or cereal boxes…or leather, bits of fabric, thin sheets of metal, used subway cards. Our favorite so far is the ribbon we bought at Hyman Hendler in the garment district, that we originally bought to make the ribbon on the Surprise Box. read more…
We find something incredibly compelling about Marjin Van der Poll‘s Do hit chair: hammering a chair out of a metal cube with all one’s strength, testing it out, and then pounding and hammering and testing over and over until it takes shape. The cube is smashed full force with a hammer, until it becomes… something else, a solution.
“Do hit… is an interpretation of a chair by Italian designer Enzo Mari, the ‘sof-sof chair’. Its complex looking frame to me seemed a result of good craftsmanship but as it turned out it was one of the first examples of spot welding in the furniture industry. This contradiction between craftsmanship and mass production became the concept for the chair. Do hit started as a small copper model which I beat into a tiny chair with the pointed part of a hobby hammer. The cube would be easy to produce industrially and would be moulded into a chair using a hammer. Repetition of the beating only strengthened the concept…
The Do hit can either be shaped by its owner or by me. I have shaped many Do hits and look for an expressive object with large folds which I then polish to make them stand out. Each Do hit therefore is different as I can only create the global shape of seat and backrest and have to react to the detailed form taken on by the metal as it is being shaped. This is a great challenge every time.”
Of course, we followed the trail back to Enzo’s Mari inspiring chair, designed in 1971 read more…
This wondrous chair was posted on Atelier a while back, unattributed. (We searched its roots using TinEye, but didn’t come up with anything). This strangely elegant little sculpture of a chair made us imagine going to the lumber yard – even an art supply store would have this wood – and getting out a hammer and nails to follow the path of this design; it is so beautifully clear and forthright.
(If anyone knows who made this chair, please send us an email…)
Lately, we’ve been seeing planks and bits of salvaged wood being used in bold geometric patterns to enclose bathtubs, and kitchen islands, make headboards and floors… Pieced together like a puzzle, with a good eye, “rustic” changes curiously to modern. read more…
A couple of weeks ago, we started posting about Lydia Wills’ former studio apartment in New York City; the 600-square-foot space had so much going on, we had to make it a series…
Here’s her renovated kitchen which, when she moved in, was the most generic of New York City apartment galley kitchens (there’s a gratifying “before” after the jump). A few years ago she ripped it out and rethought the original space. The question: How to create a pleasurable, efficient kitchen without moving any walls or spending a fortune?… read more…
When we were looking around for affordable knobs for a kitchen cabinet we wanted to use as furniture, we spent quite a bit of time hunting for ones that were the moderne shape we liked, only to discover that the finish was awful: too-shiny, too-brassy, too…cheap looking. Since the knobs we found had great lines and were inexpensive, we decided to try hacking them: we sanded them with fine sand paper to take most of the brassy coating off, and bring them down to the base metal (or was it the other way around?). We liked the roughed-up look even better than what we had in our heads.
We LOVE hacking things, customizing them, “overcoming their limits”, as Scott Burnham writes in his the very interesting pamphlet on hacking, “creating new options on one’s own terms”.
Since we first set out on our mission to find good looking clips to make shelving out of boxes, we came across Indie Furniture‘s site. (That’s what happens when you hold an idea in your mind: answers and iterations start to appear). The folks at Indie devised a clamp/joint that can fit different sizes of wood, with instructions for using them. They are so passionate about creating a do-it-yourself shelving system that would allow people to configure their own unique shelving, that they even published a manifesto: read more…
Pamela Hovland, who is our BEST scout, found this cardboard box shelving system on Etsy. It’s a variation of the clipped-together shelving idea we wrote about earlier. It is to our mind a brilliant use of an ordinary cardboard box (which we’re thinking, could even be painted with rubber paint…) It seems to be the same deal as the other clipped-together systems we’ve found: to get the clips, you’ve got to buy the box. So we’re continuing our call for HELP finding something that will do as a clips to make sturdy shelves out of boxes. read more…
Vicki Beth Lynn has an eye for jewelry. She’s bought and sold lots of it over the years, especially the work of interesting designers from past and present. She knows dealers and jewelry-makers in Paris and London, and sells regularly to television shows and movies. (She also runs a multi-media production company but that is another story…)
Vicki and I were walking around Manhattan the other day when she stopped and pointed to a huge brass chain lying on the street, securing a bike to a post. “Look, Sal.” she said,”Wouldn’t that make a great necklace?”
And I looked and saw something I’d never have noticed before (but do now, thanks to Vicki): possibilities for jewelry in all sorts of everyday things, even in the street. Translate the look of that bike chain to a wearable version (real bike chains are HEAVY), and you’d have a dramatic and startling necklace…
…there are teachers all around us, sharing what they know…
Related posts: D-I-Y Anni Albers Necklace
More Anni Albers Common-Object Jewelry
Guest Post on Viviana Torun and ‘Seeing What Happens’
Sylvie Corbelin’s Lost/Found Jewelry
During World War II, when materials were in short supply, textile artist Anni Albers improvised charming, inventive jewelry using simple components usually found in hardware and stationary stores, and five-and-dimes. This dramatic necklace uses inexpensive window chain sold on giant wheels at hardware stores and steel bobbi pins. Seeing her necklace, suddenly these objects become BEAUTIFUL and full of unexpected possibilities; our notions of jewelry change. read more…
Ellen Silverman
Years ago, when I was putting together my very make-shift kitchen, I searched and searched for a pot rack that was the opposite of the ones that seemed to be everywhere – clunky or “country”-ish, overly ornate or verging on Medieval. Nothing I found accommodated my personal pot rack idiosyncrasies that includes not liking pots hanging over head, or making my small space looking cluttered.
So I turned to towel bars. It was a small shift in thinking to envision these sleek steel bars hung with hooks and copper, rather than terry cloth. Why not use a towel bar as a pot rack? (Or simply change its name?) read more…
I’ve come across a number of posts about furniture made of pallets, those flat rectangles of rough hammered-together wood platforms commonly used to move bundled goods around by a fork lift. This lounge chair by Studiomama is a particularly good one; it has clean lines and looks like it would be comfortable – perfect at a beach house or on a patio. It is made out of two pallets and 50 screws, from an inexpensive, down-loadable plan. It would be great painted, or naturally weathered.
The ever-innovative Studiomama has other well-designed examples of pallet furniture read more…
I was just imagining how my friend Matthew, who is a gifted paper artist, might design a light out of a paper shade and hanging bulb were he given the challenge, when I came across some free, origami-like down-loadable plans on the internet. They are the “gift” of Arash and Kelly, an industrial design studio with a mission “to help to re-connect our global culture”. A video of their Octopus light being made gives a sense that this is really something an anyone might improvise upon.
But even more inspiring and full-of-info is a video of a light for which they don’t give exact plans, but do show the assembly of: plastic leaves with perforations along the edges that “zip” together to make a number of configurations. It made me think: “There’s a great approach to d-i-y lights and shades”: read more…
