stores
Tara Mann
We couldn’t live without the occasional hot bath to cool-out our over-worked selves. Instead of buying expensive, wonderfully-packaged bath salts, “spa crystals” and oils, we came up with a simple formula for doctoring baths that involves no effort at all, is cheap, and allows us to calibrate really pure fragrances to our mood.
We just dump a couple of cups or so of epsom salts into a hot tub; then we add a few drops of an essential oil distilled from flowers, herbs or other botanicals like lavender or rose geranium: voila, instant aromatherapy.
Epsom salts are an old-fashioned, tried-and-true remedy for stressful living, sore muscles, detoxifying (great at the first sign of a cold). You can buy them read more…
08.08.10 |
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in bath, bathing, cheap + great, copy this!, how-to, materials, resources, stores, strategies |
Ditte Isager
While surfing around this morning, we stumbled on an interior by photographer Ditte Isager and was struck by the wallpaper, loosely tacked rather than glued, for a whole other, delightfully un-done look. For us, it’s a swell alternative to the often-fussy permanence of wallpaper (and the difficulty of taking it off the wall when we change our minds). We went to Isager’s website to check out her work and found more lovely examples of paper wall coverings… read more…
08.03.10 |
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in copy this!, elements, inside, materials, reimagine, resources, stores, walls + windows |
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…
08.02.10 |
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in elements, hard, inside, materials, resources, sightings, stores |
Todd Selby/The Selby
We were scrolling through The Selby when we spotted these round magnet knife holders in a house in Connecticut. They are a nice sculptural change from the usual foot-long-or-so bar knife holder – the knives look like they’re floating. We hunted them down online here
…
And then almost immediately we came across this re-thinking of a dish drainer by Paulina Deltour for Alessi: another round tool that has traditionally been a rectangle. read more…
07.29.10 |
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in gifts, housewares, inside, kitchen, solutions, stores |
Rum Magazine
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…
07.12.10 |
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in elements, floors, furniture, hard, inside, materials, reclaim, repurpose, resources, resources blogs + sites, stores |
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…
05.17.10 |
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in furniture, hard, inside, materials, plans, resources, solutions, storage, stores |
Our recent call for accessible clip/clamp ideas for securing stacked boxes (wood, cardboard, plastic) to make d-i-y clipped-together shelving got a big response, all offering the same solution: large binder clips. These cheap, ubiquitous clips seem to be the go-to solution for many niggling problems. Wine writer Anthony Giglio wrote:
“I have improvised with these binder clips for years. Currently they clamp open a window that won’t stay up, and clamp those brackets flaps on the window air conditioner in place. For those shelves you would but the extra large, clamp them on and them squeeze/remove the wing handles for aesthetics. Voilà!”
…San Francisco Architect Kim Sykes elaborated on removing the handles:
“I agree that the binder clip is a magical tool. The metal wire looking handles not only fold forward as Joan mentioned but can actually be taken off once you position them in the desired place by squeezing the handles and taking them off their hinges. I think this would create a better look from the side at the vertical connections of these shelves.”
Two inches seem to be about the right size; their one-inch opening would sandwich two half-inch (or thinner) boards. Now we’re hunting for two-inch binder clips in white or colors, rather than the usual black clip
. read more…
05.02.10 |
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in cheap + great, furniture, inside, materials, resources, storage, stores, tools |
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…
04.18.10 |
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in apparel, before + after, gifts, housewares, reclaim, repurpose, sightings, stores, strategies |
Jon at Happy Mundane spotted these cool adaptable dining tables by Muuto (which means “new perspective” in Finnish) that can be ordered with different legs, tops, and colors. They reminded him of the possibilities for painting wooden tables in interesting ways by masking off parts with tape, something he did to wooden chairs a while back with great success. Here’s his how-to with the gist of this simple idea…and pix of the chairs…AND some resources for cheap wooden tables that would look cool (and expensive) painted this way… read more…
03.29.10 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, furniture, how-to, inside, materials, stores |
Blu Dot is offering a surprisingly compelling clock widget you can download to your computer. It is a one inch square that sits anywhere on your screen you like; with each new minute, a new number image appears. The effect is constant surprise and little jostles to your mind about change and possibilities. For free!
Thanks, Pamela!
03.14.10 |
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in cheap + great, elements, resources blogs + sites, services, stores, tools |
The other day we got lost in a website that is so useful and inspiring, it has become a sort of role model. “THAT’s some of what we’d like ‘the improvised life’ to do for people”, we thought, and put it in the file of bits and pieces that mirror what we imagine for its future.. Kevin Kelly, who has had his finger in a million visionary pies, has eleven websites under KK.org; one of our favorites is Cool Tools.
“Cool tools is a web site which recommends the best/cheapest tools available. Tools are broadly defined as anything that can be useful…”
We love it because we’re always looking for ways to DO the ideas that our in our head, and we need tools to do that. There are 37 or so categories of tools that you can delve into depending on your interest or need, like Materials, Design, Homestead, Learning, Consumtivity, Vehicles, Craft, Dwelling, Living on the Road, Life on Earth, Play, Big Systems…
We found – and learned about – all sorts of stuff, like Oblique Strategies, One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, a boxed set of cards created by Brian Eno read more…
03.10.10 |
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in resources, resources blogs + sites, stores, tools |
The snow is almost melted in New York but you can bet another blizzard is waiting in the wings. We thought we’d write about sleds so you can be prepared when you’re faced with a nice snowy hill, or know someone on the East Coast who is.
The reason most people don’t keep a real sled is that it takes up too much room for most of the year when there is no snow. That means resorting to make-shift which can yield unpredictable results (see list below for ideas). OR you can buy a Rocko Flake Sled from Sweden for about $12 bucks. It about exactly fits your butt with your legs in the air or tucked in tight, as you pull up the handle slightly to insure a good slide. It weighs next to nothing, so it’s easy to carry to a sledding hill or hide unobtrusively in the back of a closet while you wait for snow. Perfect design!
They’re available by mail-order at the fabulous Kiosk. We sent one to friends who just moved near Prospect Park… read more…
02.17.10 |
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in cheap + great, family + friends, gifts, kids, outside, projects + play, stores, strategies |
We were just dreaming of making a sign on the office wall the said YES! when we stumbled on a webstore call Happy Tape. It sells nothing but Japanese masking tape: slightly translucent tape made of washi paper that comes in beautiful colors and patterns. It made us wonder “Why didn’t anybody think of this before?!!!” read more…
02.14.10 |
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in gifts, materials, projects + play, resources, stores, walls + windows |
Hunter Gatherer is a blog that is appears to be about STUFF: enticing pictures of cool things for sale (no words) that it is not selling (it just points to the place that is): like the simple desk for sale at Iko Iko with a lovely curved base that looks like you could make it yourself out of really good plywood. This curiously curated selection is almost always rich with interesting, if inadvertent, ideas, like Iko Iko’s concrete block shelving (totally unlike college dorm ones)… read more…
01.11.10 |
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in art, cheap + great, copy this!, furniture, gifts, inspiration blogs + sites, stores |
Ellen Silverman
Recently, I was a guest at a dinner party hosted by architect Page Goolrick. She not only designs beautiful spaces, but lighting (for Nessen) and cool desk accessories (for MOMA), and shawls (for Takashimaya).
At the end of an evening being wonderfully fed and welcomed by Page, each guest received a goody bag filled with treasures she had curated. Traditionally, goody bags are shopping bags of samples or gifts that PR people give out at the end of an event to promote something, whether a new food item, or a movie, or a fashion line. Page took the notion and turned it on its ear. She gave her guests little things she loves: a bag full of surprises that was like opening a Christmas stocking – for grownups! read more…
01.06.10 |
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in copy this!, family + friends, food, gifts, stores |
