Bear Hill Update

Bear Hill Update

Graphic Tiles

I'm back at ceramics — investigating type, surface, color... More to come.

Atmospheric Tie Dye

shop shabd

A Color Progression

Many of the blogs I read have been focusing on some interesting color palettes lately — from the monochrome desertion of Detroit suburbs to frost-covered fields of fall, the saturation of root vegetable flesh to the slightly dialed down neons of new fashion. A surprising tonal thread connects them all.

























Detroit photos from Sweet Juniper. All others are linked photos from All the mountains...

For the Love of Crayons

All crayons are hand cast by the artist, Christian Faur, creating custom colors to achieve these inconceivable gradations. Lovely.

From the artist:
My earliest memories of making art involve the use of wax crayons. I can still remember the pleasure of opening a new box of crayons: the distinct smell of the wax, the beautifully colored tips, everything still perfect and unused. Using the first crayon from a new box always gave me a slight pain. Through a novel technique that I have developed, I again find myself working with the familiar form of the crayon.

Because of the three-dimensional nature of the crayons, the individual surface images appear to change form as one moves about the gallery space. The images completely disappear when viewed from close up, allowing one to read the horizontally sequenced crayon text and to take in the beautifully colored crayon tips -- all the while being reminded of that first box of crayons.

Red and Blue or Purple

After looking at so many maps of the United States lately with the typical red state blue state highlights that basically divide the country into what the red candidates have come to call "real America" and the rest that question them are somehow un-American or part of "Fake America". So much of the focus of the election from both sides is on small rural towns which make up a great deal of physical space but not population. Everything looks clearly divided along state lines and each state is characterized in one way or another. Fortunately things are not so clear cut and if you add just a little more information to the typical maps maybe you can see what real America is made of. Not something that you can just cut down to a single message or soundbite. Adding information such as a more generous scale to the subtleties of voting and population density to redraw the map, maybe this is more what America really looks like:

As Barack Obama said back in 2004 and this map shows, "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

I do believe we will be either voting for or against America this election, it's just a matter of if you believe in red and blue or purple.

more maps here

Extreme Home Makeover

We began on Friday night and finished Tuesday evening. All in all we put in an extra workweek of time on our kitchen over the weekend. We think it looks amazing compared to what it was. The black is chalkboard paint which was a last minute idea, saving the room from fading completely into a powder blue haze. It's been about 95 degrees everyday since the weekend and everything still feels a little tacky so we're afraid to close the doors just yet. Hopefully it will be completely cured in a few more days. Now on to bringing warmth back to the space by replacing the floors...

Something Old, Something New

I don't know who's behind it (he, he, he) but there's been a whole lot of puppy talk on here lately. Let's get back to design, shall we?

Amazing vintage Polish space stamps via my favorite type site, Ace Jet 170. can you imagine if this is what our stamps looked like? The colors alone are wonderful.




And the best part of the Olympics: new Coke bottles designs from the collision of Asian designers and musicians. I wish they put this same thought and effort into their regular packaging. The site interface is pretty nice, as well.

hbrdshry on AT

Two new posts up on Apartment Therapy:

Look! Camouflage Switches

How To: Hang a Cycloc

Enjoy!

Color, Color, Everywhere

We have unpacked all the clothes but the boxes of books and pots and dishes remain sealed. We decided to attack this whole "settling in" thing from a different angle and start with painting. The living room - full of two bow front windows, a built-in wall of bookcases and a fireplace - we painted with Benjamin Moore's "Silver Fox," seen below...





Goes wonderfully with our green stripe/floral curtains and new BluDot couches. The dining room is painted with the bluish green below which we spotted in an Apartment Therapy post. Thanks to the blogging world we were able to contact the girl who owns the studio and she gave us the custom paint code for this color. Its a happy medium between my old living room blue (also a custom mix) and *boy's green wall.





Pictures of these colors in our own apartment will follow soon...