Boro Sweet Boro

With a little help from us Urban Outfitters has boro'd the Japanese Boro Jean Quilt project from our book and made it into a cool hippie wall hanging. "Boro" is Japanese for rags, and is most often used in reference to the resourcefully mended, endlessly repaired indigo cotton futon covers of the farmers and fishers of Northern Japan. (See much more info here, and here was our primary source of inspiration during the original project). Our quilt version was made from salvaged old jeans.

Although Urban's is a slightly smaller size quilt it would also make a cool dog bed or a kind of tami mat or boro blankie for a kid.

The plum blossom-y peasant print on the back fabric (above) was also designed by us.
The middle photo is the Urban's sample, on top of our larger original, as it came to us to be okayed. The top photo is a spread from our book, taken near Linda's parents' house Long Island, Maine. The old hippie anthropomorphic shack being a "sweet home" ;-)




Home Sweet Home by Wary Meyers Denim Wall Art at Urban Outfitters

Boing Boing

Awesome cantilevered hangout with springy net seats from Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin's seminal 1978

industrial style & design opus, High Tech. 

Which, if I had to choose only two design books to have in a library,
would be one of them. 

Mezzanine into the woods made by Michael Jantzen (of Illinois, who has very lucky kids).

click to enlarge.

Key Party

Subliminal Seduction. As a 16 year-old I don't think I ever went into the High School library without nonchalantly taking this book off the shelf and then staring spellbound at the ice cube pictures, trying to see how the Ad Men embedded the T&A.

Top: the Monogrammed Key project from our own book, which, if my own ice cubes are working, you should be ordering right about now.

Wood Play

From the book "Modern Finnish Sculpture" (1970) by Goran Schildt:

"During the period between 1927 and 1954, especially in the 1930's, Aalto engaged in a series of what might be described as artistic laboratory experiments, making many of the abstract reliefs and free sculptures in which he studied the variations in pliancy of wood fibres."...

" Alvar Aalto himself explains his early experiments in sculpture by referring to Yrjö Hirn. In spite of an age difference of nearly thirty years there was a warm friendship between Hirn, the distinguished and influential Professor of Aesthetics, and Aalto, who was deeply influenced by Hirn's comments on the significance of play in aesthetic creation. It is only by forgetting practical purposes in order to subordinate himself to the inner logic of his material that the artist can raise himself from the established pattern to free creation, inspired by spontaneous joy and delight in play. Aalto's "motiveless" experiments with laminated wood, aimed solely at facing problems of form and of aesthetic effect, in which the wood was bent, split, and fixed in different positions according to its grain, were acclaimed as the first wholly abstract Finnish sculpture."


Above: Alvar Aalto, various wood reliefs/experiments, 1929- 1966
Top: A fountain of Aalto chair legs from Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found. (no presumptions or pretense- our project was only about how to make the white plinth below it...)

related:

Progettazione 1x2

Gustav Eiffel/ Enzo Mari- inspired 1x2 plank mantel ("Eiffel Mantel") just after completion in the summer of 2008. Highly mathematical instructions on how to build it are in our book Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found.

Below that is from the following spring, when a winter outside oxidized the nails and they leached into the wood grain, but I like it even better that way. It shows more of "the hand".

Above, a pig working on a Mari-esque progettazione (interlocking end table/s) in the illustration for the book's last page (the end).

also:

Enzo Mari at DesignMuseum.org

Enzo Mari at Reference Library

Enzo Mari at Daddytypes, and Greg.Org

Distressed Finnish

Aalice Cooper Alvar Aalto Maash Üpp, from the pages of 

Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found

Lou Dorfsman

Type Chess Set, from Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found. (click to enlarge)

Le French Dresser, ibid.

Lou Dorfsman

Two of my favorite projects from our book, and the man who inspired them. Lou Dorfsman, designer par excellence. Our latest post at AT is about it all, read it here.

Aalvabet

from the type on pgs 34-35 of Tossed & Found

1x2

We wrote another guest post for Apartment Therapy, this time about the easy, gratifying aesthetic solutions 1x2 boards can offer your blank walls. Above is a photo I took behind the Shell Man, in Islamorada Florida earlier this year. The 1x2s are used to ship fragile coral and shells, then thrown away out back. If you're ever looking for wood for a project, check behind places like this, or places that have free pallets, since there could be packing crates there as well.

From top: The 1x2 opening spread from Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found in a NY apartment we did; more 1x2s in another NY apartment we did; Mrs. Mark Hampton's apartment by David Hicks (inspiration); a concept page from WMT&F which includes typographic 1x2 ideas in English, Kanji, and Cyrillic.

Fireplace Type

 Brick openings alphabet (monograms), an outtake from our book. 

(click to enlarge)

Mad Man

Growing up, Mad magazine played a major role in my brain's development. An avid reader, letter writer, and paperback orderer, I can remember times with my mom at the grocery store checkout excitedly putting the newest issue on the conveyor belt and hoping it didn't slip into the crack at the end before the lady could grab it (this is how my dad told me Abraham Lincoln died, except on an escalator), and then making sure it was protected un-crimpedly between boxes of Freakies and Count Chocula, only to be taken out, read aloud, laughed at and folded-in when we got to the car. 

A seminal point in my Mad development came in 5th grade during our class' paper drive, when I found a bundle of old Mads that someone had dropped off to be recycled- older ones, which I'd never seen before! This was also probably also the first time I asked myself, "Why would anyone get rid of this?", a question which would reward/haunt me to this day.

In this bundle, which I asked our teacher if it was okay to not recycle (and somehow I think she said yes but that I should write an IOU to President Carter, or something) there was the single greatest article I'd ever read, written and illustrated by the great Al Jaffee, entitled, "If Kids Designed Their Own Xmas Toys". Seeing it was like a revelation-  one could draw something, and then make it- exactly the same. It was like a ten year-old's mind-blowing "introduction to design".  While in this epiphanal state I packed up all the issues in my French horn case and couldn't wait to get home -even though this meant carrying my French horn out in the open, which made it easy prey for a couple of older girls who liked to grab it, blow into the mouthpiece and then threaten to pee into the bell. 

So, our book is filled with sketches as well as photos, and whenever I drew a project (most projects being based on "why would anyone get rid of this"...), while not using the exact same concept (or at least documenting it that way), the Mad article and Al Jaffee's genius were always somewhere in my mind. So thank you, Al Jaffee. 

Related: Al Jaffee from Graphic NYC, and The New York Times. 

Wary Meyers multi-compartmented dresser (in progress), or, What Would Donald Judd Wear?

Inspired by Moshe Safdie's Habitat '67, Donald Judd, backpacks, and cancerous growths on trees. We just needed to decide whether there should be doors or drawers on the added wooden boxes, and unfortunately this indecision kept it from the tight deadlines of Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found, although we did use an unfinished shot as a chapter opening. It's now keeping company with other unfinished projects in our basement, but the plan is to finish it before it gets too cold outside to saw 25 drawers and doors. (We now think drawers up top and doors at the bottom).

Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found- back cover

Here's Linda's awesome design for the back cover of Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found, inspired by a combination of Roald Dahl, Let It Bleed, and Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, featuring the basketball hoop table project (page 66) and a much-scaled-down, gravity-defying, exploded-view of the Chaiseburger project (page 40).

WM'T&F comes out September 1st.

Waal Aart

Alvar Aalto table and chairs, $40, originally bought in the 70's from Placewares in Boston. To find them at a yard sale was definitely a windfall, even though we have nowhere to put them right now. But the legs and backs easily unscrew, and there are plenty of them, so we could make a wall installation like the one at the Aalto Museum in Finland (below). However, it might be fun to use just the seats and top, in the shape of a giant kitty paw (see also)

(bottom photo by ettubrute)

The Rain in Maine

Another lame forecast again this weekend, to add to the already drenched summer.

Above: A great, huge, older (80's) L.L. Bean umbrella, bought from a nice older (80's) couple who both worked at Bean for years.

Next to that is a really nice Swaine, Adeney, Brigg, and Sons, Ltd. fortuitously found at a yard sale last summer when we were looking specifically for umbrellas to stick in Tossed & Found's umbrella holder project. Interestingly at the time we were also working on a project called the Eiffel Mantel, which involved hammering hundreds of nails into 1x2 boards, a la Enzo Mari, who wrote, "...two nails should never be planted along the same grain of wood." Advice Swaine & co. should've heeded when they nailed their name plate onto the handle. (click to enlarge).

$1.50 and $3, respectively.

Enzo Mari

Soul Power

The Salty Sea

From a quick trip out to Long Island (Maine) on the 4th-

1. speedboat

2. The Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt's sailor. When I lived in Italy I had a girlfriend who wrote his name, in gum, on the bottom of a bookshelf. The shelf was only about 2 feet over her face when she was in bed, and before she fell asleep each night she'd stick her gum on it. I remember she proudly showed me the multicolored cursive Corto Maltese, among other dots and asterisks and swirls. 

3. A broken stool at the boatyard. I actually took this photo last year, and the stool was going to turn into a bike rack for Tossed & Found, but I left it on the island and never found it again. 

4. The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Alexander Calder. We found this at the bottom of a box, at a yard sale with kids, kids, everywhere. 

5. The ferry back, Casco Bay looking a little like the Mekong, with a crowded whale watch boat.

Hippie Beautility

1970's Sweet-Orr jeans from an estate sale in Connecticut a few years ago. Lovingly and Bohemianly embroidered with flowers, a rainbow, "Catherine" (Cat) and the Yes and Chicago logos. A near perfect object, with personalization, signs of use, and the golden hat trick of  hippie handicraft, typography, and utility. 

Tabletop

Dansk: small wooden sculptures posing as salt and pepper shakers.

background: rolls of patent leather for a future project, Luxo task lamp, Robert Welch candlestick, another Luxo, Gerald Thurston lamp, Royal Copenhagen vase.

Table by Wary Meyers.

Good Friday

From an awesome hospital benefit yard sale on Friday:

Andy Warhol 1971 Tate Gallery exhibition lithograph. A woman we were talking to told us, "I remember the old Tate and even if you were 100 years old and on your death bed they wouldn't give you the pensioners discount. But that's a great poster."

A Dansk teak ice bucket and pepper mill, both designed by Jens Quistgaard, a 70's California polished wood box, and 5 teak trays made in Sweden. 

Three old unsigned geometric/color studies. They might be Josef Albers, they might be a 7th graders, but they're cool and they're old and they were $5 each.