ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Instructables member wholman, who does a lot with road signs, turned one into a patio/lounge chair, using simple tools and junky wood salvaged from campaign signs (I trust ones that had outlived their usefulness, rather than having being ripped from supporters’ lawns!).

There are full instructions at the project page linked below, but of course, your approach and results will vary based on the sign you use. Which brings up a question: where do you GET used metal signs? A search for “road sign” at eBay turns up much that’s fake and some that’s seemingly real. You could also try Craigslist, a local architectural salvage place, or call your nearest highway department and ask. Anybody else have a better idea?

According to his Instructables profile, wholman is an architecture grad and a current student at the Rural Studio in Newburn, Alabama…which makes so much sense. I love their work and this is very much in the same spirit.

[via Instructables]

Autumn is a good season for cooking, and also for getting organized, which makes this $10 pot rack project (the original maker said that it actually cost her a little less) perfectly suited to these November weekends.

The step-by-step instructional, which can be found at the original post, calls for rebar as the main material of the rack. Lifehacker notes that copper pipe, albeit more expensive, might look more at home in a traditional kitchen. I’d add another possible material — black pipe — which looked oh so right as the supporting material in these desks that Mike Perry and his studio-mates designed for themselves over the summer.

[from Lifehacker, via Wise Bread]

Welcome to “Weekend Warriors.” Every Friday, we run a shining example of a reader’s recent makings—to say TGIF and send you off right into your own weekend’s projects. This time, New Zealander Drus Dryden, of hat stand lamp fame, returns with—finally!—a good use for old phone books. Have a project you’d like to see showcased? Email and let us know about it.

Phone companies are printing millions of phone books that no one uses. Give it a nice cover, and it’s upcycled it into a doorstop. Other re- incarnations could be “the Paperweight,” or “the important-looking Book,” but I settled on “the Doorstop.”

By the way, is it “doorstop” or “door stop”? Perhaps I made a typo on a book with three words in it.

Is this ready made-able? I guess you would have to have some basic bookbinding skills? Or you could support your friendly, local book-binder?

If you’re doing-it-yourself:

1) Cut cardboard to the dimensions of the phone book’s covers & spine. The trick is to do 3mm less width than the book on the cover, and 2mm more width on the spine.

2) Then you PVA glue the cardboard to book cover canvas (you can get it from any craft store). Leave a 4mm gap between covers & spine, and cut the corners of the canvas before folding them over.

(more…)

As an architect and designer, Annie Coggan had the tools to put a creative spin on what otherwise might have been a disorienting transition: moving from Brooklyn, New York to Starkville, Mississippi. The move, prompted by her husband’s teaching position at Mississippi State University, along with what we might call the general “recessionary mood,” served to spark a quirky and slightly bookish project.

Inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” a book about the local food movement, Coggan was determined to “work within arms’ reach.” She decided to open a small restaurant that would serve gourmet comfort food made with local ingredients, and she crafted the menu with her brother, Ted Coggan, a longtime Atlanta chef. When it came down to furnishing and decorating the space, however, they faced some tough decisions.

“I always work in two tiers,” says Coggan. “I work in a really pragmatic way, but I also always try to connect my work to storytelling.”

The pragmatic dilemma was clear to Coggan. Good quality chairs for commercial use are expensive. “I plain couldn’t afford them,” she says. On the storytelling front, too, commercial chairs were clearly lacking.

Searching for inspiration, she started studying the vernacular chair of Mississippi and eventually landed on photographs by Walker Evans.

“Looking at his way of making images, I noticed he’s always got a surrealistic quality,” she says. “Things are normal and understandable, but in his best photos something is a bit peculiar.”

Coggan imagined that, if Evans were to make a chair, he would find a peculiar piece to add to it.  She had found her story. She would rescue old Mississippi chairs and perform surgery on them. She would create something new and surreal.

Coggan looked for chairs all over the place and found many broken ones for free. If she ever bought one, she never paid more than $20 for it. Thanks to Mississippi’s long tradition of wood-working and its established furniture industry, she also found a few large boxes of furniture legs, balustrades and other wood objects that had been turned and carved. The boxes became her “limb repository.”

(more…)

Welcome to “Weekend Warriors.” Every Friday, we run a shining example of a reader’s recent makings—to say TGIF and send you off right into your own weekend’s projects.

When Diana Cohen and Wes Slaymaker added a family room to their older home in Madison, Wisconsin, they wanted the roof to work hard for the watershed.

The view from the roof.

“We live a couple blocks from an urban lake, and storm water run-off is a concern,” Diana explains.

So, instead of boring old shingles, the couple designed and installed a “green” roof: 220 square feet of hardy, low-growing plants, plus a paved walkway and room for chairs. (more…)

Welcome to “Weekend Warriors.” Every Friday, we run a shining example of a reader’s recent makings—to say TGIF and send you off right into your own weekend’s projects.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get in my (physical) inbox a brown envelope containing two issues of an old-school zine called Letters I Will Never Send To You, by Morgan Inez of Columbia, Missouri.

Started in December, 2008, Letters I Will Never Send To You is zine-making at its classic finest…a riot of handwriting and typography and collaged images and recipes and thoughts and experiences, like a free-wheeling tour through its author’s heart and mind.

One of those recipes was this beaut, for grilled peaches with blue cheese, honey and black papper. In case the scan above is hard to read, the recipe goes like this.

GRILLED PEACHES WITH BLUE CHEESE, HONEY AND BLACK PEPPER

8 large peaches (firm, but ripe. halved & pitted)
Vegetable oil
Maytag blue cheese (at room temperature)
2 t. honey, warmed
Coarsely ground black pepper

Heat grill to high. Brush cut side of fruit with oil. Put peaches on grill, cut side down. Grill until outside is golden brown and caramelized, about 2 minutes. Turn the peach halves over and grill 1 to 2 minutes longer, until almost soft. Put peaches on a platter, cut side up, and place a piece of cheese in the center of each peach. Drizzle with honey, and grind a little fresh pepper over the top of each. YUM YUM YUM!!!

The weekend after I received the zines in the mail, I went to a barbecue in Red Hook, at which some guests I’d never met before brought and made grilled peaches—just plain cut fruit on the barbecue.. Is this more common than I thought? The peaches were exquisite, but I couldn’t help thinking they could use a little dressing up. Is there someplace I can still get peaches at this last-gasp-of-summer season, or will I have to pine for this dish until next year?

Get your own copy of Letters I Will Never Send to You by sending $2 and a couple of stamps to:

Morgan Inez
P.O. Box 1998
Columbia, MO 65205