Maria Robledo

Easy-Peasy Flower Arrangement: Bowl of Floating Blossoms

A reminder we found on Maria Robledo’s instagram: for a fab flower arrangement just float little blossoms (you can pick a few your garden or in the park) in a shallow bowl of water.

A Minature Tabletop Pond of Floating Blossoms

At Maria Robledo‘s house the other evening, a huge glass bowl of floating blossoms and petals replaced the usual flowers on the dining table: a charming and surprising “pond” made from three simple elements: a bowl + water + blossoms or flower petals.

Dive into A Flower for the Meaning of Life (Pollan)

After we found this intimate image of blossoms by Maria Robledo, we came across this extraordinary passage from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. He describes what we are seeing when we look deep into the blossom of a flower. It has deepened our view mightily of even the most ordinary…

Real “Jell-O” in Endless Flavors

It was a revelation when I tried making a homemade “Jell-O”: it had a beautiful color, with a flavor that was intense, vivid and REAL. It was so simple to make I wondered why there was instant; it’s little more than fruit juice jelled with unflavored gelatin, has very little sugar and no additives or colorings. I’ve found it has as much appeal to adults as to children; I serve it for dessert at dinner parties. Here’s the basic formula and three favorite iterations.

Birthday Wishes for a Beloved Improvised Life Contributor

Today is photographer Maria Robledo’s birthday. We have been secretly celebrating her birth all day, counting our blessings that we got to know her and enjoy all the beauty she finds and sends so generously our way, like the wondrous riff of instragrams we published a few days ago. In her honor, we send her this fabulous, little virtual…

A Powerful Spring Poem with Robledo’s Wondrous Images

When we stumbled on this powerful little haiku, we thought right away of Maria Robledo’s wondrous flower assemblages…where we found another surprising haiku.

Instagram-Inspired Collage Wall Paper

We have a thing for custom-made wall paper, that is, wall paper with images we would love to see, rather than the usual flowers and stripes. Although we aren’t crazy about the DIY wallpaper we saw on San Francisco Girl by Bay recently, we LOVE and see huge possibilities in the process. Writes SFGBB Editor…

Recipe for Improvisation: Rustic Root Vegetable Soup

I love recipes I can make from whatever I have on hand, like this Rustic Root Vegetable Soup. It is made from refrigerator staples: long-keeping root vegetables – leeks, potatoes, celery root and parsnips – that retain their flavor and texture for weeks. Check out Maria Robledo’s still-life photographs to see just how beautiful and curiously-inspiring they…

Our Graffiti’d Holiday Message to You

Photographer Maria Robledo sent us this graffiti she captured LAST January: perfectly Improvised Life. We’ve saved it all this time to present as our holiday message to you…

September is Fig Season! Riffs and a Recipe

We “awoke with a start” realizing it is full-tilt fig season when a reader wrote to say she applied our tomato drying technique to figs, which she has in abundance on her tree. Oh my. It’s fig season! What is so grand about figs is that they are perfect unadorned or paired with the simplest of foods, prosciutto…

Exploration: Maria Robledo’s Frame Series

In May, we gave photographer Maria Robledo an antique silver picture frame that had no glass or mat; you could see right through it. Hand-wrought, it had a built-in stand of two crossing silver poles. To our surprise, Maria started using it as-is to frame cut flowers from her garden. Over the past weeks, she’s sent us…

Cherry Season’s Perfect Desserts

We can’t remember a cherry season lasting SO long, with such an abundance of plump cherries. If we owned a restaurant, a bowl of iced cherries would be our featured dessert. (It’s also the perfect, surprising, understated end to a dinner party.) There is little better… …except perhaps

Emergency Medicine: Love, in It’s Many Forms, Heals

This past week, after we accompanied a dear friend through a dire emergency in the hospital, we witnessed the many ways that friends and strangers “lent a hand” with what seemed like an overwhelming amount to handle. Neighbors put groceries in our fridge, friends brought dinner to the hospital, some, like Maria Robledo, sent us images that…

Line a drawer with Cloth not Paper

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…

A Net Bag Becomes a Scarf and Necklace + DIY

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.

Maya Angelou’s Wise Words about Life and Table

On Wednesday, Maria Robledo sent us this image of a quote by writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. The following day, we learned that Angelou had passed away. The women had a WAY with words and with living. So we’ve selected a few as tribute.

How to Salvage Stained Cloth: Embroider It!

Photographer Virginia del Giudice has both a wonderful eye AND, we discovered, a fine hand with fabrics. Witness her beautiful “fix” of some permanently-stained fabric. It reminds us of kintsugi, the artful repair of damaged things.

Murals Inspired by Frescoes to DIY or Buy

These images Castello Sonnino’s frescoes that Peggy Markel emailed us from Tuscany got us thinking about mural services we’ve come across in our wanderings, and just what images we would put BIG on a wall.

An Urban Patio Prairie of Ornamental Grasses

After we’d been living in the Harlem Laboratory for a while and gotten our bearings, we turned our atttention to the 50-square-foot patio that overlooks a glorious park in New York City. What to plant? Our friend-with-a-green-thumb Maria Robledo said simply: “Grasses”. Grasses? “Yeah, plant ornamental grasses on one side of the terrace. They’ll form…

The Unexpected Beauty of a Matless, Glassless Picture Frame

Recently, we gave our friend Maria Robledo a silver picture frame we’d had for many years. It was handmade and so beautifully and simply wrought, we’d never put a glass or mat in it, or even a picture. In Maria’s hands, it became something totally else. We’d never SEEN it that way…

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