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Irritation is the Message: Turn Ugly Shopping Bags Inside Out to Make Them...
I pondered the maxim "Irritation is the message" a long time before understood that the things that irritated me were the things I sought solutions for. I started transforming ugly shopping bags.
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An Ad Hoc Indoor Pond for Spring Blossoms (Su Tung Po)
Blossoms knocked off their stems make for free flower arrangements in the form of ad hoc indoor ponds like the one photographer Maria Robledo devised (the perfect accompaniment to this poem written...
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Picture Frame as Magical Objet
We love this skeleton of a picture frame hung pictureless on a wall. As we gaze into its empty space, we find ourselves imagining all sorts of things while we enjoy its austere shape. It reminded us of...
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Mark Betty’s OMG Inspired Lampshades
This lamp by English lampshade designer Mark Betty has this description "Lamp and Brown Paper (or whatever you want)" . The brown paper rolled into an asymmetrical cone and secured with a pin seems to...
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Clothes Quickly Tailored with Extra Buttons and Magnets
Lately clothing ads coming over my transom have been featuring men's shirts with an extra side button. When you put the usual buttonhole around THAT button, it pulls the shirt into an asymmetrical...
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DIY Backrest for Comfortable Improvised Daybeds
The art consultant and dealer Peter Heimer’s postwar Berlin townhouse has all sorts of cunning details. We love the yellow daybed Heimer designed himself. The slanted pillows are brilliant, forming a...
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A Website Can Be a Sanctuary
We hadn't thought of a website having the ability to act as a sanctuary until we read about Laurel Schwulst's odd, charming Firefly Sanctuary It is at once a digital space that mirrors a physical one —...
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Stenciling Ugly Concrete Sidewalks (and Other Things)
I didn't realize how naturally brutalist concrete sidewalks are — drab gray, strangely crude— until I saw leaves painted on the sidewalk outside a Harlem plant store. The harsh, dreary slabs were...
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DIY Kintsugi Repair for Beloved Broken Things
Photographer Ellen Silverman recently sent us photos of her Kintsugi mending project which we SO admire. We've had it on our list to try kintsugi, the Japanese way of repairing broken things with the...
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A Streetside Vitrine Dispensing Free Handmade Pottery… and Joy
San Francisco ceramicist Nina Saltman created an inspired riff on the Little Free Libraries that have popped up across the nation. Nina's Little Pott Shoppe is a tiny outdoor vitrine that offers her...
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Swirly Cutouts in Wood Antidote and Amplify “Modern”
For years, I thought this image was of a fireplace mantle and admired it for the swirly cutouts that softened the usual rectangle while maintaining a curious modernity. It's an image from my file of...
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‘Dream Bed’ Dreams…
My deconstructing mind was smitten with the possibilities of a "dream bed" I stumbled on on Instagram. So I went on the hunt to figure out what it would take to make it, and in the process, learned a...
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Transforming Ordinary Materials Just for the Hell of It
We love when some visionary soul shifts ordinary objects into the visually beautiful and surprising. And reveals the ordinary for what it really it: material full of possibilities...
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Pockets as Facilitator of Personal Freedom
Hazel Beeler's extraordinary letter to the New Yorker about pockets is rich with ideas and revelations including extraordinary improvisations she makes to her clothing — including undershirts…
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