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solar-powered moon lanterns for summer nights

Installing hardwired, outdoor lighting can be a big, expensive, all-too-often unaesthetic hassle, forcing you to put lights where you really don’t want them, and use commercially produced fixtures that are less than enchanting. One elegant, inexpensive solution is solar lanterns. My favorites are Allsop‘s faux Japanese shoji solar lanterns available in a rainbow of lightweight polyester that mimics silk.…

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fab diy outdoor clawfoot hot tub

I see these outdoor junkyard tubs featured here and there, but I liked the rustic simplicity of this one, from a diy featured at Houzz: salvage transformed into elemental luxury. We had one years ago on our back deck in Malibu. I found an old tub for $5 in a junk yard with a flaking ocean…

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3 improvs: pilgrimage, kickstarter win, poetry practice

We are constantly knocked out by the wonderful endeavors our readers are involved in, committed to, CREATED out of nothing, improvised. Here are a few from the past week: David Downie and Alison Harris set out from their home in Paris to walk across France to the Pyrenees, the French portion of El Camino de…

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windowsill still-lives: mindfulness practice in action

Mindfulness practice – learning to be present in each moment– is something many people are embracing these days. Business are incorporating it and classes abound. Perhaps the most often-recommended “exercise” is washing dishes mindfully, although we know few people who really do it. Recently, we heard of one that did, truly. No surprise, it is…

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‘make a mark!’ with whatever is at hand

Last Fall, designer Susan Dworski, a reader and frequent commenter, happened to mention carving rubber stamps out of Staedler Mars erasers to make artworks. “How did you get into that? we asked. Her answer was stunning: Been carving them since 1980 when our house burned down, and only my studio was saved. All four of us all…

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the tenacity of spring (and us)

March, 2013. A sugar snap pea vine uncurls to grasp a rusted garden fence. So tentative and fragile, it’s hard to imagine that by the end of April the fence will be all but obliterated in a tenacity of leaves, blossoms and pods.   Kay Ryan, the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States, sums up what it…

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pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling annotated: 13 rules for creatives

Over the past several months, Pixar’s former story artist Emma Coates‘ 22 Rules of Good Storytelling has been flying around the web. Although we find it to be excellent advice for writers, we found annotating it made it even better: a list of fine life principles for any creative soul. Our favorite: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not…

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nail salon anti-boredom strategy: read out loud!

In response to our recent post mentioning the hilarious David Sedaris pickpocket story, ever-improvisational Susan Dworski sent us this email: I recently undertook a Sedaris readathon and plowed through all his books in one fell swoop.  To avoid the usual, well-thumbed celebrity-smut at my manicure salon, I introduced the notion of reading several Sedaris stories aloud to…

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‘the world sends us garbage, we send back music.’

(Video link here.)  Susan Dworski alerted us to this stunning video, in an email with the subject line: “ah, the improvisational human spirit”.  It’s about a remarkable orchestra from a remote village in Paraguay — a slum built on landfill — where its young musicians play with instruments made from foraged trash. The village’s inhabitants…

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reader’s improv: rubber-stamps from carved erasers

In response to our Dangerous Paths post, graphic designer and illustrator Susan Dworski sent us wonderful email: Several years ago I illustrated an 18th century Japanese saying using watercolors and rubber stamps made from hand carved, Staedtler Mars Erasers. The message reverberates across time. The message not only reverberates BIG TIME, but so does the idea of carving…

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