For an interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama created a totally white room as a palette for visiting children to embellish as they pleased with colored dot stickers; ultimately thousands of stickers were used, to make bulls-eyes, whorls, dribbles and overlapping hits of color. The results of this…
Read MoreThe treasures to be seen on YouTube continue to astonish. For this lazy New Year’s weekend, we offer Émile Cohl‘s Fantasmagorie; created in 1908, one of the first animated films. To make this film, Cohl placed each drawing on an illuminated glass plate and then traced the next drawing-with variations-on top of it until he…
Read MoreFor years we’ve enjoyed a mantle with no fireplace. It was taken out of an old house in Maine; it’s color, an ochre yellow milk paint. It leans as a sort of sculpture against the living room wall, defining the space in a unique way, and just like that, it is a pleasure. Then some…
Read MoreOne of our readers, Pippin, recently sent in us a photo she’d found on flickr, with the following message: “someday (someday) i’m going to put canvas on a wall as wall paper, and then just paint stuff on it—layer after layer. an experimental wall.” We love the idea of an experimental wall whether it be…
Read MoreWe spend a lot of time thinking about how to live our lives in a way that honors our spirits, however you might define the word. But even though some may find it a bit grim, we also find ourselves thinking about how we honor each other in death as well. Sometimes we come across…
Read MoreWhen You Have Been Here Sometime recently posted some images from Architectural Digest, New York Interiors, 1979, we were struck by this one. Although lamps and pouf and carpet are all pretty dated and rigid, a great idea remains: covering a homely piece of furniture with beautiful fabric. Who knows what’s under the ochre yellow panel? It…
Read MoreWe spotted this charmingly painted wall of a Berber house in Ouno’s great post about the beautiful “broken” geometry of Berber rugs from the Beni Ourain region. We were intitially inspired by the idea of chalking or painting an image/pattern like this on the side of ANY building – a sort of mental d-i-y fantasy…
Read MoreHolton Rower, whose Tall Painting got over 2,000,000 hits on YouTube (so far), sent us this photo of a car he spotted on the road. It is painted with strong, heart-felt messages that go WAY beyond the bumper sticker…easy enough to do, though it takes a kind of out-there courage. (It somehow reminds us of…
Read MoreWe’ve just returned from a visit to Helvetia, West Virginia where two dear friends had passed away within a couple of weeks of each other. Both lived long amazingly rich lives that touched a great many people. We came home tired, thoughtful, amazed, sad, inspired…and slowly started back to work on ‘the improvised life’. As…
Read More(The Bittersweet Chocolate Brownie Cake recipe link in the previous post is FIXED. Sorry for the inconvenience.) photo @ Abbey Christine via Flickr Related posts: non-romantic d-i-y email valentines valentine’s gift: merit badge our best d-i-y chocolate gifts for valentine’s day are you an improvisational cook?
Read MoreWe were browsing through sylist Sara Sjögren’s website, when we came across several rooms decorated with painted panels. Easy-to-d-i-y rectangles of plywood or stretched canvas painted (or sprayed) with a single vivid color bring these rooms to life (imagine them without the panels and you see what we mean)…
Read MoreWe love maps of ideas and are inspired by this photo published in last weekends in Sunday New York Times Business Section. It got us thinking about how to create a good-looking erasable wall without having to use chalk. (Chalkboard paint is GREAT in many places, but we wondered about other options.) We thought of the “whiteboard” often…
Read MoreBig Think recently filmed a series of interviews with Wylie Dufresne, inspired chef of WD-50 in New York City; our favorite segment is called “Why You Should Play With Your Food” . We’ve followed Wylie for years, delighting in the products of his rigorous experimenting in molecular gastronomy, like freeze-dried polenta, deep-fried mayonnaise and hollandaise, smoked…
Read MoreWhen we need a table in a hurry for a project or a bigger-than-expected-crowd-for-dinner, we pull out a pair of folding aluminum saw horses we keep the closet. We lay on a top made out of a hollow-core door or a slab of plywood cut to whatever size we like (we’ve got a small version…
Read MoreAtlas Industries, who makes gorgeous, furniture-like, fiercely expensive shelving and storage, sent us an announcement of a new product: a folding screen. We are always on the look-out for folding screen options to divide rooms and hide the stuff we don’t want to look at in our small space. The screen costs $2400 and we’d…
Read MoreTwenty years ago or so, I designed a kitchen for a space I thought I’d be in forever. I had cabinets made in a Shaker style that I hoped could walk the line between classic and modern for a long time, and bought myself a restaurant stove. Ten years later, life changed, and I had…
Read MoreRecently, 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…
Read MoreFor a while now, I’ve been collecting pictures of dream houses. Collectively, they fuel my imagination for the house I hope to have one day. Most aren’t perfect, but either have a feeling I like, or some elements that I’d cut-and-paste into the design of my someday home. They are a way for me to…
Read MoreBob Staake, creator of the charming children’s book Donut Chef and dozens of New Yorker cartoons, draws with a mouse using an ancient version of Photoshop. This video speaks volumes about the virtues, and humanity, of computer-generated art, and how fluid the process can be, once you loosen your head up (which this video will do).…
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