These Golly Pods—otherworldly porcelain succulent planters designed by San Diego-based Jason Lane (of Bells & Whistles) and Britton Neubacher of Tend Living—have just beamed down to Earth’s surface. I love the cheeky take on mod forms. They also come in hand-lathed wood. Who’s your favorite martian?
[via Tending To It]
A big shout-out to reader Gwen for turning me onto these amazing stoneware Sky Planters by Boskke (an “evovled gardening” firm started by two Kiwi brothers, Jake and Patrick Morris), which literally turn everything you thought you knew about tending houseplants upside down. I’m no rocket scientist, but luckily, you don’t need to be one to figure out how the Sky Planters work. The plant and soil are secured by a ceramic ring and plastic mesh. Fill the porous terracotta reservoir at the top of the Sky Planter with H20 and it will slowly nourish the plant in a classic time-release manner. Now, when you say that your plants are hanging by a thread (or, in this case, a thin stainless-steel cable), you can really mean it, and for once it’s not because you don’t have a green thumb. Sky Plants only need water twice a month!
I’ve been putting off writing this post mostly because I have no logical words to describe the vibrant, multi-media work of San Francisco-based artist, Sarah Moli Newton Applebaum. I can only state the obvious: Her exaggerated, confusing, color-wonderful crochet work, costumes, and other fabric and paper manipulations seem to be the landscape of dreams. Not bucket-list-type dreams, but the escapist dreams that occur when you’ve fallen into a deep sleep or ingested a combination of reality-altering potions. As someone who suffers from Ordinary Dream Syndrome (in my dreams I’ve been known to grocery shop and organize the cupboards), I want whatever Sarah’s having. Make mine a double.
Huge hats off to my friend Greer who sent the link to Yamaha Motor’s insane Paper Crafts website last week when it seemed too hot to be inspired to make anything at all. I guess that was because I didn’t know I could be downloading detailed instructions for a “realistically colored paper sculpture” of a Giant Armadillo, Stellar’s Sea Eagle, Grevy’s Zebra or a Cuban Crocodile. If rare animals of the world aren’t your thing, there are also a dozen tricked out Yamaha motorcycles you can build. Summer doldrums, defeated.
[Images: Yamaha Motor]
I’m a sucker for notebooks, as you know. But for me, this one, this maze-filled, roller-coaster ride of ruled paper—dubbed the “Inspiration Pad” by its creator, Brussels-based graphic designer Marc Thomasset—really, literally, leaps off the page. Imagine the unexpected twists and turns your diary, torrid romance novel-in-the-making, grocery list, and dear-John letter would take. I like to call it the new I-Pad.
[Images by Marcel Veelo via Behance.net]
Sure, your vacation plans this summer may include a four star hotel, hot stone massage and some much needed R&R by the pool, but have you considered roughing it in Sweden? Of course, you wouldn’t really be roughing it in the new Treehotel, which opened this weekend and is sure to make quite a splash around the international design scene.
Boasting four uniquely designed cabins (from mirror-covered exterior walls to a life-like installation of a bird’s nest!), the rooms are low on supply, but high on demand. My favorite by far? The Mirrorcube, designed by Tham & Videgard Arkitekter, which consists of a lightweight aluminum cube-like structure hung by a single tree.
Gorgeous, yes? Certainly elevates your everyday camping experience (glamping, indeed!).
[Images, from top to bottom via Inhabitat]
Thanks to a recent introductory tweet by South African textile designer, Heather Moore (aka @skinnylaminx), I’ve become rather fond of the colorful and quirky vintage collectibles at the online shop and Flickr photostream, Wooden Donkey. The eccentric mix of tea pots, egg cups, moneyboxes and salt & pepper shakers (among many other things) from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s is curated by London-based, mono-monikered Emma, a children’s-book editor, vegan, and clear sucker for colorful graphics and illustrations. Because it’s in my nature to love things I cannot have, here are a few of the items from the shop archive that I wish I had swooped up. Don’t you fall into the same trap.
Cathrineholm Lotus tea kettle
Meet Sam, a self-professed wallflower who loves people-watching and boasts an incredibly green thumb. Will sparks fly when she runs into Dan, the down-to-earth outdoorsy guy who loves to think outside the box?
Time will tell, indeed!
[Images: A+R, Sina Sohrab]
Chrissy Angliker crafts lighting pendants, fixtures and lamps with little more than your average measuring tape. I love how the coils are tight enough to produce an unexpected pattern, creating the perfect balance of re-purposed craft and modern use.
What would you craft with measuring tape?
[Images: Chrissy Angliker]
This week I received the catalogue for this fantastic looking exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (whose motto I love: “Always Fresh, Always Free”). Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft consists of twenty works made in craft’s Big Five—glass, metal, wood, fiber and ceramics—by a wide variety of artists over the past thirty or so years. The hook is that they all involve performance in some way. The catalogue features essays by two of the leading writers and thinkers on craft and culture, Namita Gupta Wiggers (curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon) and Glenn Adamson (Head of Graduate Studies, Research Department, Victoria & Albert Museum, London).
A Nashville, Tennessee native, Lily Kane now lives in Brooklyn. A former Director of Education at the American Craft Council, she currently heads up Exhibitions & Publications at the Tribeca gallery R 20th Century. Raised by design loving parents with a covetable collection, she lived in a Marcel Breuer dorm at Vassar College and has been lecturing and writing about contemporary and historical design ever since.
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Erin Loechner is a freelance design writer/blogger whose work has been featured in Glamour, Dwell, Lucky and Nylon Magazine. She muses daily on her award-winning website Design For Mankind, founded in 2007 in an attempt to bring light to today's creative design culture.
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Leilani Marie Labong is a freelance design and lifestyle writer living in the super-crafty, crazy-inspired, ridiculously innovative metropolis known as San Francisco. Thus, she too is creative, but only by association. Leilani writes about design for 7x7 Magazine, California Home + Design, Real Living Australia, the San Francisco Chronicle and her own charmingly unfocused blog, A Ruffled Feather.
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