kids Archives - Page 4 of 5

led-illuminated shipping pallet bed

We love this bed made of shipping pallets that the endlessly clever Swedish designer Maliin Stoor built for her daughters: a chain of LEDs illuminates it from underneath. Here are details…

makeshift hand splint/sculpture

Our friend Charles McFarlane, who attends highschool in New York City, sent us this astonishing photo in an email… “Recently my friend hurt her wrist. Our teacher, whose father is a hand surgeon, rigged this up for my friend until she could get to the doctor.” Stainless steel ruler + rubber gloves (or are they balloons?)…

playing, dreaming, improvising

What kids do. What we should do. Photo unattributed, via Under the Sun.

inner resources (via Eloise)

The other night a friend who was recuperating from an injury asked us to tell him a story as he fell asleep. A story, we wondered, h-mm-mm. Why not read a kid’s book for this exhausted, wounded grown-up. Looking through our library, an ancient copy of Kay Thompson’s Eloise jumped into our hands. As we…

pollock-esque paint-spattered floor

This picture on Wary Meyers’ site stopped us dead with desire. Writes Wary: “All kinds of awesomeness from Molly and Norman McGrath’s incredible 1978 book on interiors for kids, Children’s Spaces: 50 Architects and Designers Create Environments for the Young. Without a doubt the best book ever published about children’s design.” We see this fab paint-spattered…

come along for a ride into space…

Objectified cinematographer Luke Geissbühler and his 5-year-old son Max made a homemade spacecraft out of a Thai food takeout container and a weather balloon, and outfitted it with an HD video camera and an iPhone. Last August, they sent it into space. “The mission was…was send it up into the upper stratosphere to film the…

tubby’s lemonade improvisation

We found this wonderful Tubby comic (a character in the great Little LuLu comics of the ’30’s and ’40’s) during our weekly visit to Accidental Mysteries on Design Observer. When life hands you lemons, make…………!!!!!!!!!!! Go Tubby!

step-stool as bead organizer, via 5-year-old marco

Our friend Anthony Giglio sent us this email: …being a vertically-challenged Italian-American with extra-tall kitchen cabinets, I keep a step-stool at the ready for a quick boost. This week while trying to pack lunch boxes for Sofia and Marco I couldn’t find my white, plastic step-up, and calls out to the family yielded not a…

a new year: 20 seconds old…

…at the Big Apple Circus in New York City. (After the late show in the one-ring circus in a tent, just before midnight, clown noses, hats, noise makers and champagne are passed out to the audience… …then, in a moment, the old year turns to new: JOY as clowns, performers – aerialists, acrobats, contortionists, jugglers…

a cool way to free up the creative process

A friend sent us these photos of the drawings her young artist/fashion-design-o-phile daughter made on her desktop, with this note: ” My daughter artist drawing on her brand new desk… When we moved into our new home w her NEW desk, she needed to make it her own. I was blown away when I saw…

kid’s toy craft as home design inspiration

One of our favorite blogs these days is Made by Joel, the toy and craft projects that artist Joel Henriques makes for his kids. He manages to make A LOT out of ‘nothing’: dollhouses out of Cheerios boxes, puppets from paper clips and cardboard, cities from paper. The thing that we love is how Joel’s…

malted milk 101 + recipe: chocolate malted pudding

“I keep drinking malted milk, trying to drive my blues away…” –Robert Johnson, Delta Blues Guitar Legend,1937 Although malted milk powder has been a staple in my pantry for many years, I didn’t actually know what it was until recently. I was making a batch of chocolate malted pudding and suddenly wondered what this homely,…

makedo plastic connectors (for improvised halloween costumes and ..)

Makedo is a set of simple plastic connectors for creating things from the stuff around you, like cardboard, plastic and fabric. This little video gives the inspiring gist, as does Makedo’s image galleries in many categories: creatures, structures (our favorite…there’s even a boat), domestic bliss, vehicles. And for Halloween, check out these cool costumes:

roald dahl’s ‘revolting recipes’ and other kid’s food books

Over the years we’ve collected a pile of favorite books to give to kids we know; many of the books, curiously, are about food, maybe because kids (and we) find it so much fun to mess around with. We’ve just added Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes to the list; it’s got some mighty compelling recipes, like: …Stink…

rube goldberg summer camp

This video is the wonderful product of the rather informal, seemingly impromptu Rube Goldberg Summer Camp, devised by and for the Kidde Woodward family and maybe a few friends. It is pure joy. We’re imagining one of those little kids telling what they did on their summer vacation…

translucent lego’s, for skyscrapers n’ things

In response to our post about the Lego store, Lydia Wills sent us an email about the translucent Lego skyscrapers made at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City a few years ago. It’s an illuminating (literally) P.S. to our post on the dream of making monochrome Lego furniture, now that we can…

impromptu drowned cell phone rescue (+ life lesson)

We got an email from Manny Howard this morning about an improvised save for water-logged digital appliances (and a great general approach to take when the #$%!! is hitting the fan). We know Manny to be prone to minor disasters from his book My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into…

new music from the vegetable orchestra

The Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria performs original music made and inspired by instruments made of vegetables. Cucumberophones, celery bongos and leek violins might seem like something out of a Max Fleischer cartoon, but they are very real. They yield original sounds and music, with an ephemeral quality because of the living – and fleeting…

an inspiring early improviser (age 4)

kimono + 7 belts + 7 beaded necklaces + red shoes + heart shades + Mickey cap ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! With thanks to Tara Mann (who this is/was in 1995)

happy easter…passover…spring…

With thanks to Nancy Raimondo, who made an egg-decorating table for the children at her Easter dinner last year!

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