After a friend proudly showed us unique patch she’d done underneath her sink a few months before, we had to know the story AND the material ahe used. It’s become an essential tool in our arsenal.
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Clawfoot Tub Sofa to DIY or Buy
We’ve watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s many times and never noticed the very makeshift decor of Holly Golightly’s apartment: the crate coffee table…luggage storage bins…and…the wonderful clawfoot tub sofa. THAT set us on the hunt…
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Basho Haiku for Cabin Porn
The other morning, we opened our favorite book of haiku to this astonishing three lines by Basho, written in the 17th century. Life in this world— a makeshift hut like Sogi’s. Such pleasure, contentment, and wonder in a simple makeshift hut made us think of ones we’ve admired…
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Tree Slab and Stone Bench + Other Improvs at Camp
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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chair frame transformed with ribbon, bungees, string
We posted an ad in Craigslist looking for an assistant and found the most amazing people doing very cool things —blogs, tumblrs, writing, artworks — just…because… At Vanessa’s A City That Endures tumblr, we stumbled on the work of photographer Michael Wolf. He documents the random detritus of the man-made world and the beauty and order that underlie the…
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laurie anderson reprise: jerry-rigging
We’ve been listening to Homeland, Laurie Anderson‘s great-to-work-to album. The track “Only an Expert” (short version below) reminded us of one of our favorite videos, Jerry-Rigging, reprised from an early, experimental, now-defunct section of ‘the improvised life’.
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inspired makeshift: a year of personal fashion
Makeshift is a wonderfully expressive term for “making a shift”: shifting your thinking to come up with a creative solution that accomplishes the task at hand in a unexpected way. When you find you don’t have something you need, you improvise a substitute or “shift” what you are making to accommodate it. Makeshift is one…
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