celebrations

Happy Easter, Passover, Spring 2014!!!

A SWELL Easter egg in the realm of graffiti…with Spring wishes from Improvised Life!

Confetti Bomb Your Party or Table Top

Although regular confetti often has a slightly cheesy feel, Etsy seller Knot and Bow’s colorful fat tissue paper confetti dots seems like they’d be a festive way to updo a tabletop or party space, for a planned “bombing” beforehand, or a surprise one last minute. Anywhere.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!!!!!!

Ellen Silverman sent us a digital Valentine of hearts she found on the streets of Paris. Hearts seem to be hidden everywhere, if you LOOK.

A Heart-Shaped Boulder for Valentine’s

Graphic Designer Pamela Hovland sent us this image for Valentine’s, with this message: I always look at this big heart-shaped rock in the park where I run my dog. I finally decided to photograph it (pre-storm) in order to use it for an upcoming Valentine’s Day greeting. Thought you’d like it also…There’s a “broken heart” rock later on…

A Chocolate Valentine’s Cake as Easy as Making a Brownie

With the difficult weather, you may find your self on-the-hook for a Valentine’s gift for tomorrow. If you’ve got the basic makings in your pantry for brownies, we recommend our tried-and-true Essential Chocolate Cake for Improvising recipe. It’s as easy to make as a brownie, with a good deal more bang for the buck, AND there are endless ways to improvise on its essential formula, adding in all sorts of unexpected flavorings to delight your beloved.

The Improvisational Possibilities of Mallomars

Not only is the Mallomar a seasonal food, it inspires endless improvisations on how to eat it. Here are 7 to start.

Find: Big, Stylish, French Striped Dish Towel / Napkin

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…

Draw Your Holiday Tree with Chalk or Pastels

Every year, we celebrate the theme of alternative, stres-reducing ways to experience the holidays. If you’ve got a chalkboard painted wall OR slab of wood, or a huge sheet of paper (we’re thinking our big roll of Kraft paper we keep on hand) you can draw a tree or ANYTHING in chalk or pastels. Here’s some inspiration.

Nicoise and Other Black Olives with Fragrant Rosemary Oil

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.

a holiday tree made of stacked vintage books

We can totally relate to Midcenturyjo of Style Files‘ complaint that she’s having a hard time wrapping her head around the fact that Christmas is next week. Her response was to fashion a holiday tree out of vintage books, another fab alt-tree for our collection.

Virtual Gift Cards That Do Good AND Deliver Your Best Wishes

Long ago we started to unhook from obligatory — and often stressful — holiday gift buying. We became big fans of giving money to a charity in friends’ names, instead of the usual gift that nobody needs. Every year, we send charity gift cards, VIRTUALLY, a website that allows you to design your own cards (to a degree) and then send them in a sort of digital envelope that the recipient gets to open online.

More Minimalist Holiday Decorations

Years ago we started moving our holidays toward minimalist, in part to unhook from some of the frenetic (and stressful) activity of the season. Decoration-wise, we put a few elements around that makes us feel the season without being a big deal: some fragrant pine branches from a friend’s farm, some beautifully sculptural ornaments from…

Leaping Lebkuchen Bauhaus Style

Leave it to the Bauhaus to put their unique design sense to Lebkuchen, the traditional German Christmas cookies similar to gingerbread.

Minimalist Holiday Decor: Paper Cut-Out Holiday Tree?

We’re thinking how nice this tree would be on a wall. We envision just cutting the shapes out of big sheets of colored (or painted) paper and tacking them on the wall. Swell.

Ideas for Improvising: Cool DIY Holiday Garlands + Decorations

Images of christmas garlands made by school kids in Cuba (below) made us think of the materials at hand for making something pretty. That sent us imagining and hunting around, and we found a trove of possibilities, offered here just to spur your imagination.

Paper Packaging for Homemade Holiday Gifts

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…

DIY Gift or Hors d’Oeuvre: Tapas Bar Roasted Almonds

Here’s a favorite homemade food that I can give as gifts AND serve to guests who come by for cocktails or dinner, or a bash. It evokes the sublime combo I first had in Spain many years ago: chilled bone-dry Manzanilla sherry with roasted Marcona almonds. I devised a “parallel” almond that has many of the same qualities for little work or cost.

Sally’s Holiday Gift Ideas on The Splendid Table

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.

More Vegetable Table Decorations

Although we’ve tried out hand at herb bouquets and vegetable decorations for the holiday table, we realized there are LOTS of possible improvisations on those themes when we saw these swell ones from iiiinspired. We love that they’re composed of everyday vegetables. The trick:

Entertaining Tip: Write Guest’s Names On Their Wine Glass

A couple of years ago, we posted about wine and spirits writer Anthony Giglio’s inspired practice of writing the name of each guest on his/her wine glass to cut down on “lost” glasses (and the attendant OMG-there-aren’t-enough-glasses stress). Anthony uses a china marker, a wax or grease pencil that writes perfectly on glass or china…

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