Lately, readers have been giving subscriptions to Improvised Life as gifts for friends and family. Just go to our subscribe page and select a year’s subscription to give 650 or so illuminating reads per year. We also recommend checking out Improvised Life’s Shop for a personally curated selection of compelling books, tools, housewares, and toys that…
Read More
One of our favorite times in the holidays is wrapping gifts, usually done last-minute before flying out to a party, with whatever is on hand. We have some closet space dedicated to found papers, ribbons, fat hunks of rope and interesting colored twines, a vast variety of colored tapes, salvaged boxes as well as Dollar Store shopping…
Read More
For those wondering how to navigate the lavishness and commercialization of Christmas, we recommend “Abundance without Attachment”, Arthur C. Brooks’ New York Times’ op-ed in which he tells of the three principles he’s learned for handling the painful contradictions of the season and of our aspirational era.
Read More
Check out Public Radio’s The Splendid Table interview with Sally about her favorite gift ideas for cooks and eaters. Most are inexpensive but give a big bang for the buck. To find more about the gifts on Improvised Life, click here for a roundup. You can also hear her favorite holiday tabletop decorations (some of which made great…
Read More
Last weekend we bought a big fat book of Pablo Neruda’s odes for a dear friend’s birthday gift. Loving to improvise the presentation of our gifts, we went to our collection of found ribbons and wrappings wondering what would strike us. A very long, thin green ribbon gave us the answer: it would become a 3-foot+ bookmark that…
Read More
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…
Read More
Remodelista recently posted about a new trend: Artful Coffee Drippers. By “dripper”, they mean the funnel-shaped cone, lined with a paper filter, that sits on top of a coffee pot or cup and allows the brewing coffee to drip through. We use the method ourselves so were interested to see the 10 stylish itereations. The only problem with most of the Remodelista coffee cones is they don’t allow for ways to keep the coffee hot, unlike our own homely rig.
Read More
I’ve long been a fan of the classic, humble string bag that changes structure according to its contents. Space-saving for the minimalist and super-light for the traveler, string bags save on plastic and paper bags – and they look great (a black one makes a great evening bag).
Read More
We’re not much for the Valentine’s frenzy of chocolate-buying and crowded dinners out, but DO like to give a Valentine or two. It can be as simple as an origami heart made by following the simple video above but done with a BIG square of swell paper…OR any of our compendium of last minute Improvised Life Valentine cards and gift ideas…
Read More
Not only is the Mallomar a seasonal food, it inspires endless improvisations on how to eat it. Here are 7 to start.
Read More
Over the holidays Ellen Silverman gave a dinner party for 14 and wanted a special napkin that guests could take away with them to remember the event. She found some inexpensive but wonderfully stylish big red striped cotton dish towels that a friend machine-embroidered with a pretty design. They were in perfect keeping with the wonderful bistro-ish…
Read More
(Video link HERE.) We’d seen images of multi-colored Balancing Blocks around but didn’t WANT them until we saw this swell little video. It made us reflect on ‘process’, and long days on a beach spent happily balancing stones…which made us want the white ones. They’re
Read More
Here’s another of our holiday recipe strategies: black olives that we’ve doctored up with fragrant homemade rosemary oil. We serve them as an instant hors d’oeuvre with chilled wine or cocktails AND pack them into glass jars to give as gifts. The method is simple.
Read More
After a run on the great L’Econome paring knife, World Knives has informed us that they have big stock of the endlessly useful, ages-wonderfully knife, in many colors. They also had some comments about our readers.
Read More
Where do you get the jars to pack your juice homemade food gifts in? We have three strategies: collect them over the year (soak the labels off nice-looking jars some other food has come in), buy vintage jars at flea markets and thrift stores OR buy them. Here’s our compendium of great looking affordable jars.
Read More
We excerpted the one perfect trick for the holidays from Grant Thompson’s 10 Life Hacks You Need To Know For Christmas!: a way of folding paper so you can send it without an envelope. Voila! Instant holiday greetings.
Read More
Every year, I make big batches of Prunes in Armagnac, Cherries in Red Wine Syrup and Apricot in Cardamom Syrup to give as gifts, packed into pretty jars, with handwritten tags listing their possibilities. I also rely on them for my own entertaining, to serve as fab instant desserts. They are all made by the same basic approach. Here it is, with some recipes to illustrate.
Read More
We hadn’t thought much about packaging suggestions for homemade food gifts until our friend David Saltman was casting about for bags to pack his home-roasted coffee beans in. We had a dwindling stash of white metal tie coffee bags we’d bought years ago by begging the coffee guy at our local gourmet store to sell…
Read More
We never really understood the possibilities in yurts, the round nomadic shelter until we saw images of William Coperthwaite’s Yurt on the Blue Hill Peninsula of Maine. Windows all around, on 3 levels.
Read More
Sally shares her favorite holiday gifts on public radio’s great The Splendid Table. All are charming, unexpected and inexpensive, and many can be homemade or bought. They will be appreciated by a wide range of folks whether they’re serious cooks or not. A sheaf of poems is just one.
Read More