Over the years, we’ve come across chair frames and carcasses — the structure without soft back or seat in place — and wondered what we can do with them. Recently we came across a compelling idea for transforming chair frames: wrapping them with a layered, intersecting network of suspenders to form the pan and backrest. The elastic framework provides comfortable, lightweight seating.
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Looking for a skillet to fry some eggs in at Maria Robledo’s house, we opened a drawer to find a brilliant idea we never would have thought of: line a drawer with a cloth, such as a dish towel instead of the usual paper. It cuts down on clatter and the cloth can be easily…
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Recently, our friend Jane Lear wrote us to say “This great tip stuck in my head, and I finally had a chance to reference it in this week’s food advice column for TakePart about ways to use less water.” The tip that stuck in her head —YAY! we LOVE that— was wine and spirits writer Anthony…
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When inspiration comes: you have to go to meet it… From one of our favorite, endlessly-yielding books: The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations. Open it anywhere to find a nugget.
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On the way to the airport ten years ago, He Liangcai, a Chinese farmer-turned-amateur inventor lost his luggage. That loss gave him the idea for a transportable suitcase that could come with him to the terminal. He spent the next ten years developing his drivable suitcase using the frame of an electric scooter with a suitcase wrapped…
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Some time ago, I spent a week at Omega Institute, a non-profit educational retreat center located in Rhinebeck, New York. It’s kind of like a summer camp for adults who want to retreat, take workshops, be in nature, mull over where they are in their lives. Since Omega was originally a summer camp for kids so…
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Early on in planning the Laboratory renovation, we started thinking of ceiling lights. Since the ceiling was only eight-feet-high, we were trying everything we could to give the illusion that they were higher, achieved mostly by replacing the squat doors with tall ones that created floor-to-ceiling vertical lines that made the ceilings appear higher. In…
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It took National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols 32 days to photograph the President, a 3200-year-old, 247-foot-tall giant sequoia in California. (Click on the image twice to get a full measure of BIG.) One of the oldest trees in the world, the President has stood witness to millennia of history. We spent quite a bit of time trying to find out just what exactly those 3,000 years might have entailed. Here’s a bit of the story.
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We’re ten days into our Friends with Benefits subscription program and heartened by the response. After an initial surge, subscriptions have leveled off, with an unexpected increase in readers. What is most surprising is that about a third of our subscribers gave MORE than the base price. Each subsription is like a gift. It was WONDERFUL to receive some revenue just as the…
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I’ve never tired of the classic Italian formula of a raw vegetable — most commonly arugula, thinly sliced fennel or raw baby artichoke hearts — dressed with olive oil, lemon and thin shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. One day when I was looking around my market, I thought, “Why not try not making it with sugar snap…
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We USED to wear high, wild high heels. Over the years, the heals have slowly come down in height as we find ourselves unable to walk tilted forward…and because we really want to WALK, far and fast. Footwear designer Silvia Fado put her creativity to work solving the problems of unwearable heels, that, while they make…
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When we were starting to think about planting our 50-square-foot terrace, we hunted around for low-profile, minimalist planters that would keep it looking as spacious as possible. It proved no mean feat to find something good-looking and affordable…here’s what we found.
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When I was presented with a beautiful net bag recently, something made me loop it like a scarf around my neck so I could wear it. It is one more surprising use for a net bag, which, I’ve discovered you can make yourself.
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We were very moved by both this tree that is over 2000 years old and Anastasia Pottinger strangely similar photographs of people 100+-years-old, nude. We found some haiku to accompany them.
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Cy Kuckenbaker compressed one hour’s worth of surfing footage into a two minute film. Ahhhhhh, such a nice break, especially viewed full screen. We were going to find some music to go with it, and then realized the music is built in: the ocean’s surf. via Design Boom
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When we renovated the Laboratory, moving and installing our 25-year-old kitchen cabinets for the 3rd time, we indulged our minor obsession in the realm of dish drying accoutrements, hacking and customizing at will.
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We came across another good idea from the portfolio of journalist and photographer Amandine & Jules that seems to be something of a trend: NOT painting moldings and doors a separate color but rather the same color as the walls, to make a uniform, less busy and, depending on the color, more contemporary look.
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(Video link HERE.) Our friend Holton Rower wanted music to listen to while he fried his morning eggs. He couldn’t think of one band. Then he remembered a kind of Indian fusion music he liked from a dj with a name like Baad-something. So he typed B-a-a-d into Youtube and struck gold. He and his wife…
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Puppet artist Jim Hensen’s illuminating view of money was partial fuel for Improvised Life’s new Friends with Benefits program, through which we hope to continue to make “concrete things happen out of worthy ideas”, with our heart and principles intact.
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Just as we’re on the verge of buying a sewing machine so we can actually MAKE some of the things we imagine, we’ve been seeing images of beautiful patchwork rugs made out of vintage kilim remnants. Wondering if it would be possible to DIY them ourselves, we went hunting for kilim remnants.
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