handmade

West Coast cabin – Clayoquot Sound, B.C.

September 6, 2012

West Coast cabin – Clayoquot Sound, B.C.

The cabin is probably the true vernacular architecture of British Columbia’s West Coast and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver must once have had some of these buildings, thought rampant demolition and ugly development are doing their best to eradicate any trace of this architectural past.

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Atention People’s Faceing Northeast

August 6, 2010

Atention People’s Faceing Northeast

Photocopied sign found taped to telephone pole in Chinatown, a few blocks from my studio. Beautiful poster of the apocalyptic warning variety. “The dotes are the extraterrestrials ship’s.” I love how ‘dots’ is misspelled, and apostrophe is on the wrong word, but A+ on spelling ‘extraterrestrials’ correctly.

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Walking bookcase by Wouter Scheublin

July 18, 2010

Walking bookcase by Wouter Scheublin

Walking bookcase by Wouter Scheublin. “The movement is based on the principles of the walking platform devised by 19th century Russian mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev… when pushed, the legs carry the object along using a complex system of cranks, links and connecting rods.

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Marble runs – every house needs one.

December 3, 2009

Marble runs – every house needs one.

I spent hours as a kid making marble runs, using anything that was lying around my dad’s tool area. I’d usually start with a big chunk of solid wood (usually cedar, left over from deck-building) and make the marble wind around it in a spiral, down tracks made of elastic bands stretched between two pairs of nails, thin slats with grooves whittled out, leftover copper plumbing pipe etc.

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Categories: design, Uncategorised

Makeshift, by Hunt & Gather’s Natalie Purschwitz

September 21, 2009

Makeshift, by Hunt & Gather’s Natalie Purschwitz

Makeshift is a year-long project by Natalie Purschwitz, clothing designer and founder of Hunt & Gather, the award-winning Vancouver shop and clothing line. Her project is this: for a whole year, she will wear only clothes she has made herself, and that includes everything – “all of my clothes, socks, shoes, underwear, coats, jackets, hats, bathing suits, and accessories.” There are only a few exceptions – hair accessories, tools, eyeglass lenses.

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Categories: design, Uncategorised

PS re: Miltary Guild of Rural Tailors & Liam Maher

March 23, 2009

PS re: Miltary Guild of Rural Tailors & Liam Maher

The Militant Guild of Rural Tailors, a mysterious outfit we recently stumbled across online, seemed to be a cross between an elaborate imaginary historical narrative and a men’s fashion line.

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Categories: design, Uncategorised

Berber rugs, the art of a “people from between somewhere and nowhere.”

October 8, 2008

Berber rugs, the art of a “people from between somewhere and nowhere.”

Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen used these rugs regularly in their interiors, which is not surprising. Their unusual combination of minimalism and handmade detail, restraint and inventiveness works well with modernism’s aesthetics by both echoing the abstract geometry of the architecture and also counterbalancing that austerity with some softness.

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