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 Francisco, known for its wonderful murals, from one end to another…
(and which happens to be right around the corner from Humphry Slocum, our favorite ice cream place – more on that later)… read more…
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,
it’s hard to separate
work from life
the blurring of
the lines is beautiful
but sometimes it can
be quite taxing
you never know
when to stop.
step away.
refuel.
That would be us. So we’re heading out of town for a week or so to rest and fill ourselves up again.
We thought we’d leave you with this beauty of a video: cooled out, fluid, dancing… improvising… in the rain. (We recommend turning the dubbed-over sound off to really SEE it…closer to how it might be if you were hanging out just down the street…)
via BoingBoing
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…
We are so happy to have discovered Serendipity Rising, architect Daniel Hale’s blog that is mostly about the evolution of his home in Napa Valley, which seems to be a sort of laboratory for his ideas. The guy loves soft metals like zinc and lead which he cuts and hammers in unusual ways; he transforms salvaged woods and ‘finds’ by applying modern lines and layers of techniques into an eclectic take, like this incredible flight of stairs: “I layered black over brown and ran a strip of lead sheeting up the middle”. What he does to his own house is freer than the “client” work we’ve seen, as he follows his ideas for his own pleasure. “Tickle” is a recent post – a sort of poem-story (edited here) – about his violent and fearless transformation of an old piano, which had been left in the winery he turned into his studio: read more…
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…
Pamela Hovland alerted us to a wonderful essay posted on Design Observer recently, called The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship; it is about how “everywhere you look in India you will find evidence of the maker’s hand.” A sign painter, faced with a drain opening smack in the middle of his underwear ad, transformed it into a “navel”. The bucket of a massive backhoe (below) is embellished with a welded pattern of metal strips, a bit of beauty in a most unlikely place. Ken Botnick and Ira Raja explore the ways these kinds of embellishments are ”a means of celebrating life” in India; they also explore what it means to be “a maker” – anywhere.
…”on India’s streets, the act of making functional things — cups, chairs, signs, books — is creativity at its most direct expression; meeting a need. Embellishing that object, making it special, requires that the maker take time with the thing to ask more questions, not only about its function, but also about the person who will use it, and about how to distinguish that object from the universe of things that surround it. Embellishing… simultaneously makes the object more reflective of the maker’s distinct personality and brings it into the shared cultural values of beauty and function. Embellishment delights because it surprises. It is found in completely unsuspecting places, like the bucket of a backhoe. It takes ordinariness and celebrates it as if to say, “Hah! You didn’t find this beautiful, this lump of dung, but here it is and it is beautiful.”
We loved learning things you can do with saris that we never imagined, which made us see them in a new way, like this fence made of saris… read more…
Constance Old recently sent us a compelling email: “After our comments exchange on your post about “American Pickers” I had a feeling I might see this table again that location agent Andrea Raisfeld plucked from my car and reworked.”
And sure enough, the little table appeared completely transformed on Andrea and her husband Bill Abranowicz‘s blog A + B See:
“Andrea is a proud dumpster diver. Much of the furnishings in our homes were procured from places other than a store. While we buy plenty, we love the thrill of the find at a tag sale, side of the road pick-up, or thrift store. It’s part of our reduce, re-use, recycle philosophy.
On a recent scout to one of her client’s homes, the homeowner, artist Constance Olds, pointed to a car filled with all kinds of stuff destined for the thrift store. Andrea peered into the back seat, and spotted a small wooden table. Constance originally purchased it at a thrift store to use as her daughter’s drawing table, and had always intended to repaint it herself, but years later still hadn’t gotten around to it, and now the daughter was adult sized. Within hours of getting it home, we had it painted.
I love my dumpster diving momma!”
Now that is Creative Re-Use! Here’s how they did it: read more…
We’re totally addicted to the History Channel’s “American Pickers” for many reasons but mostly because it taps into our primal need to hunt, hoard, share, trade, wander, and tell stories.
Antiques don’t magically appear in your local antique store or flea market. They are foraged and found and repaired by people like business partners Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, the shows unlikely stars. Mike is the thin buttoned-down Bud Abbott character while Frank is more Lou Costello with his day-old beard.
Together they wander the back roads of America in a white panel van in search of what most people see as “dumps”: broken down houses and garages you speed past on the way to the beach or the lake, that appear to be filled with junk. When Mike and Frank find one of these places, they’ll pull over and introduce themselves to the owner – older men, widows, daughters – who might be willing to let them forage through their stuff, hoping they’ll come across some treasures to buy, if not some compelling stories.
The result is great television full of improvisation. read more…
For the yearly fashion show given by Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, Isabel Cohen wired together hundreds of metal washers to make the halter top for her floor-length attic insulation skirt (inspired by jellyfish tentacles). It was her answer to the show’s challenging theme: “Create an outfit made of anything but fabric”.
The show is the mastermind of Nancy Fried, the school’s sculpture teacher, who wanted a project that would really engage her twelve students. Now in its seventh year, it has become the event-of-the-year at Fieldson, with many students – and even some teachers – taking on the challenge to create outfits out of dot-candy papers, beads, condoms, fake and real money, Legos, Tic Tacs…
Everyone should have a teacher like Fried who encourages them to go way beyond the expected…
We also love Anne Kunstler’s jelly bean outfit… read more…
We find ourselves inadvertently collecting images of fabulous dresses made out of unlikely materials, like this beauty made by Cristina Liedtke from discarded peanut M&M wrappers. It’s on display at TerraCycle’s Green Up Shop, a pop-up shop set up in empty retail space in Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
“To create the gown, more than 1,800 flowers were individually cut and sewn from 600 Peanut M&M wrappers, a time-consuming process that took over 100 hours of labor. (Five yards of silk charmeuse and silk shantung were used for the lining.)
Liedtke’s wearable artwork depicts flowers in bloom: The top of the dress displays the initial budding, while the middle portrays a ‘landscape of blooming vibrant poppies,’ according to the designer. ‘Finally, the bottom of the dress expresses a collage of fully bloomed mature flowers,’ she adds.
Terracycle is a company who makes useful products out of garbage, like an Oreo Wrapper Kite and planters made out of crushed computers and fax machines. They package the products in “garbage” as well: used/recycled bottles, boxes etc. Terracycle seems to have figured out ways of recycling that have stymied city governments.
Says CEO Tom Szaky: “Garbage is opportunity.”
Check out this video about Terracycle: read more…
Lawrence Downes
Haitian children make small kites out of whatever they can find – twigs, dry cleaning bags, thread spooled on a can or bottle . Flying homemade kites is relief from their harsh reality. read more…
Constance Old recently alerted us to Crispina ffrench’s work:
“Crispina ffrench is an artist/crafter who makes terrific “improvised’ work. She is author of a recent book called The Sweater Chop Shop: Sewing One-of-a-Kind Creations from Recycled Sweaters
Felting is essentially a controlled way of washing knitted wool until it shrinks and tightens, changing both texture and color. We started to imagine huge possibilities right then and there (and in the inadvertently shrunken sweaters we may have mistakenly given away)…
We also remembered Page Goolrick telling us about the black turtleneck she made into a cardigan; she cut it right up the front with a scissors and had her local tailor sew in a big stainless steel zipper…
We started to deconstruct our notions about cut knit unravelling unmercifully, and started to think about old sweaters completely differently… read more…
I was walking across 125th Street in Harlem the other day and noticed a guy standing outside of a store, wearing really surprising earrings in one ear. “Wow, cool earrings” I said, “Did you make them?”
“Yeah, and they’ve got a story…” He said with a smile. He told me he dreamed them, dreamed of earrings made of mailbox keys, etched with his astrological sign, Aries. So, he took a couple of mailbox keys to a jeweler and had them etched…in silver.
He was really proud of them.
…Original and beautiful, with a backstory I never would have guessed.. read more…
