Official Member of the Charley Harper Fan Club

Round about Christmas time, I was excited to find Charley Harper puzzles and baby tee's at Old Navy. Harper was a graphic designer whose interpretation of nature's forms is nonpareil.


Todd Oldham, who published a beautiful book of Harper's illustrations, introduced the product line.

I'm excited to discover a flickr pool fan club devoted to Harper's work. Go there, look around and you'll be a fan, too.

Recent Projects

Each month I have a column in TimeOut Chicago called Tossed and Found. I take a humble found object and redo it. Here's the Twitter chair. I replaced the old back with a bird silhouette cut from plywood, then painted it a robin's egg blue and added a seat cover.



A dog coat made from a thrift shop jacket. A lucky find, the $7 jacket was quilted, making for a cozy canine.

Next, an old brass lamp I painted black, then added a $10 shade recovered with a beautiful asian paper.

Bird Notes

Posted notes with the harbingers of spring. From my inbox this morning, sold by P.O.S.H., a tabletop store in the Loop in Chicago. It mixes vintage treasures with reproductions, French and diner styles.

Making Work Portable

Cardboard furniture. Featured at the International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago last month.

On a Mission for a Fun Read

This one won't disappoint. It's a perfect mix about vintage fashion, flea market hunts and one woman's adventures in bringing it to the Manhattan crowd in her boutique, Hooti Couture.

Alison Houtte, a former model, and her sister, Melissa, give us the backstory on vintage fashion and the people who wear it in Alligators, Old Mink and New Money. Here's a link to the Hooti Couture website, too. Enjoy!

Black, White and Read All Over

From last weekend's scouting safari, here are two ways to decorate with yesterday's information. Have plans to paper your walls with newsprint? Better do it quick! Newspapers across the country are folding like lawn chairs.



This dresser is decoupaged with pages from a French book on botanicals. Asking price, is around $375.

Color Forecast

I'm drooling over this book. It features the 78 colors Pantone forecasts we'll be surrounding ourselves in paint, fabrics, countertops, upholstered pieces and just about everything on the home front. It also gives visual inspiration for color harmonies and combinations. Pricey, though, for us nonprofessionals. Let's brainstorm....how can we write off the $395 price....

Stairway Before and After

The bad and the good. Not as originally imagined, the palette for these attic stairs turned into a study in blue and aqua, with the original khaki green left in for contrast. I used five shades of left over paint.

I'm a world class sloppy painter. The Goofus to Gallant's neatness. Even with a floor cloth, newspapers and tape on each step, there were several drips and painty footprints around. They cleaned up with warm water and soap.

She Wrote the Book

Some of us in the industry might be overqualified for this book, but there's something so very appealing about one woman dedicated to the art of cleaning the house. Making sure the sills and floor are spotless, the corners are, too, and above all everything feels and smells wonderfully fresh.

Then again, maybe I'm not so overqualified for Thelma Meyer to be my project manager. Her book of tips, charts and lists might be the next best thing to having her as a next door neighbor to come over each morning and make up the to-do list. She's managed to be raise nine kids, be exemplary tidy and build a career on her experience. In my book, that's a role model.

Chest O'Drawers

In the spirit of St. Patrick's day....freshly sanded and painted from the garbage.

Birds and Brains

Bird templates, part of the weekend's work to get a pattern looking right for a current chair project. While the vision was clear and sharp in my head, it wasn't coming out that way for Step 1 on paper. Step 2 was unnerving, too, because it required a jigsaw. Growing up in a small town, we didn't have shop class, so missed that great opportunity to make de rigueur memo holder or the cutting board in the shape of a pig.

Stairway to the Bad and Good

Like a zillion other offices, businesses and nonprofits across the country, my department got the axe yesterday. The good news--now I'll have time to paint the back stairway. Hells bells, as my mother would say, maybe I'll have time to paint the whole 3rd floor.














The treads on the attic stairs were sanded and revarnished a couple months ago. When they were not quite dry, I sprinkled them with sand to prevent skidding. It works nicely. I also did this on the back kitchen stairs, prevented many potential disasters since they get a lot of traffic.







The attics stairs are ready for a Domino Magazine(RIP) treatment, something colorful but a little toned down from these.

Consider this post the before portion of our program, more to come if I have time (what a joke.)

Meet Ups in January and February

Make
Ffffound
The Barefoot Contessa
Cindymindypindy
Papercutting.net
Elsita
Snippety Gibbet
The Heart of Papercuts
Food Network

Be Mine

Looking ahead to February 14. Simple hearts made from random watercolors splashed across the paper and then cut out.



Suitable for framing.

A Glimpse

Talismans on the Totem of Life

A glimpse of creativity from four imaginative girls who are now gifted young women. Each Christmas the four friends would trade something handmade - a clay sculpture, a journal of pressed flowers. These watercolors are from one year's present, a calendar with twelve illustrations strung together with yarn.

It's one of my favorite possessions. This year I'll make frames for the collection of 12, hang them in a personal place for awhile, then send three to each of the four friends.


Hearts


Fourth of July


A calendar page

Tell Time with Color

Clock by James Beattie uses the Pantone color samples to visualize the sun's luminance in the sky over the course of a 12 hour period. It's courtesy of Make, a magazine devoted to DIY technology projects.

Here's an example, a table redo using dominoes, since they were on sale at Target.

Cutting Edge Design

from The Heart of Papercuts

Looking around for a way to add some excitement to a little painted bookshelf and noticing all the amazing works of papercutting on the web. Pure imagination. Along with framing, some of the 1-dimensional designs might make great surface decoration for a plain piece of furniture.

Here's a list of papercutting, or scherenschnitte, sites based on a little research. It's just 3 items long--all you need to get a sense of the magic of this craft.

The Heart of Papercuts
Cuban-born Elsa Mora shares her work plus a generous list of Etsy sellers and fellow papercutting artists. She also links to her Etsy siteof papercuts and illustrations, such as this one.

You can get to know more about her through her personal blog, Elsita.






Papercut pattern card from Cindymindypindy

The website, Papercutting.net, is a 360 degree source for patterns, books, kits and how-to's for making your own papercuts.



from Snippety Gibbet

Snippety Gibbet mixes her love of scherenschnitte, teaching art, family and a little tech experimentation on her blog.

Monday Enlightenment

January Seedlings

Planted just 10 days ago.

January TV Watching

I used to think she was smug. She had all the ingredients for it---house in the Hamptons, a husband home only on weekends, a handful of metrosexual friends. What could be better than that? But I'm loving Ina Garten's reinvented show on the new Food Network, Back to Basics.

In scenarios of helping friends create memorable events, we see her incorporating communications devices along with the cooking gadgets she's always used. Ina prints menus from her laptop, then snaps show and tell photos with her digital camera. In one show, her friend (gorgeous and gay, of course---51% of her audience is men) takes a video of her setting the table so that he can reproduce the tabletop at home. None of these devices are cutting edge, really they're pretty ubiquitous pocket communications, but their use parallels the thread of modern ease she's known for in cooking.


That part of her philosophy is double emphasized in Back to Basics. While other star chefs rely on labor-intensive and complex processes, Ina give us the fresh take that simple tastes good. We see her assembling no-cook appetizers for a party and driving to a local bakery for dessert.



The shows I've watched end with her sitting at her laptop to email her friend and see how the party went. Somehow this works to give a modern yet intimate last look at Ina. Start to finish 360 support from Ina Garten--what could be better than that? Just one more thing, I think--her recipe for attracting stylish gay friend.

Flights of Fancy

Buterflies for all seasons, made from magazines clippings, colored paper and pipe cleaners, of course.

Now's the Time in 09

Day six in the new year and I feel a little like the sister in The Polar Express, the one who lost the ability to hear the jingle of Santa's bell. The holidays are over, it's back to school and work, where's the fun in that?



Of course there's the pleasure of a new year stretching before us and waiting to be filled with summer and birthdays and the magic of ordinary days. There'll be time for new projects and fresh starts, clean closets, newly swept rooms. Much richness to look forward to after all.

In my own work, I've reworked some of the contents of this blog for a local slant under the domain Fine Diving in Chicago. There's tons of creativity in the design and recycling community in Chicago, and as with this blog, I hope to contribute and help illuminate some of them. Please stop by and if it strikes you, tell me what you think.

I enjoy looking at your sites, learning what's new and what catches your eye as you write and publish. To alll of us--onward and upward at the top of this new year.

Meet Ups in November-December

Oh for the love...
Charley Harper
Mrs. Meyer's
Heather's Cottage
On the Dot Creations
Swiss Miss
Fernando Brizio
Old Navy
Minwax

Reframe

Like lots of blogs by earth-conscious writers and designers, this one is about the RE words:
Reclaim...Recreate...Renew....Revive...Re-use.

Of course, as I was thinking out loud, the comedians in my family came up with their own RE words, such as:
Revel....Regret....Refund
and
Recipe...Request....Reptiles

A page from last year's calendar in a found frame represent my holiday wishes for you.







Relax....Renew.....Rejoice.....Repeat.

A Party in a Dress

On her site, Swiss Miss, Tina Roth Eisenberg points out how wearing a dress can be an interactive experience each time you wear it. Designer Fernando Brizio has created dresses with pockets for felt- tip markers. Placed inside, the markers will bleed to create a different pattern over time.



The dresses are versatile, too. For each occasion, you can simply wash the dress to create a new look.



So interesting. Designboom has more photos of Brizio's creations here.