The Greatest Show and Tell on Earth
Harnessing the power of collaborative learning and DIY science, California’s Maker Faire aims to combat throwaway culture by giving young people the tools and inspiration to invent. Read more.
On Grandmothers, Drag Queens, and Mending Your Clothes
You don’t have to be a political radical or a homesteader to make, mend, or alter your own clothing.
"I imagined my attempts to do [laundry] on my own resembling some hellish episode of ‘I Love Lucy.’ I braced myself for the possibility of destroying my bathroom and still having piles of dirty underwear."
— Alison Geisler, Hard Times Call for DIY Laundry Day
Stockholm-based street artist Akay has created the “Rainbow Warrior: Tool No. 05.1” which is part of his “Instruments of Mass Destruction (Complicated Technical Solutions to Aide in Simple Acts of Vandalism) Series,” that includes the previous “Robo-Rainbow: Tool No. 10.” For both of the “art-making’ tools, the individual attaches an implement to the back of his/her bicycle.(via Designboom)
From Brooklyn to Portland, Minneapolis to Austin, people are sharing the love and their homemade, homegrown, or foraged edibles at modern-day food swaps. Too many pickled beets in your pantry? Trade a few jars for a dozen duck eggs. An overabundance of hand-foraged mushrooms? Swap them for lavender-infused vodka.
This week, a circle of cooks, canners, bakers, and urban farmers launched the Food Swap Network, a new online community for those who want to trade their wares and connect with likeminded DIYers. The site is a good stop for first-timers, giving tips on how host a food swap, attend a food swap, and find a food swap in your area, and also offers glimpses into thriving food swaps around the country.
Although the sight of shoes hanging on power lines is a common form of graffiti, this functional wooden alternative doubles as a birdhouse for the migrant pied flycatcher. (via Designboom)
Making A Panterragaffe (A What? And Why?): Based on Theo Jansen‘s Kinetic art, Panterragaffe is a pedal powered two person walking machine, a walking bicycle. The name has a few elements to it. It’s a play on pantograph, which is a mechanism for copying drawings, since it’s similar to the leg mechanism. Also; Pan – all or spanning. Terra – earth. Gaffe – an unintentional act causing embarrassment to it’s originator or just goofiness. A bit of goofiness for everybody. To most people the name doesn’t mean anything, therefore its meaning is flexible. (via MAKE)
Hong Kong-based design duo Chan Oi Yau Riyo and Kwong Ho Sun Howard of Shannnam exhibited “Fragmented Chronicles” at this year’s Tokyo Designboom Mart, part of Tokyo Designers Week 2011. The collection is composed of 100 rings, each with a landscape frozen inside. The jewelry spans different topics, from children’s characters to nuns standing in the snow, a woman walking with a suitcase to a shepherd with his sheep. Each is a visual story invoking a reaction and stirring the imagination of the wearer. (via Designboom)
Fizzy Business
While the phrase “soda fountain” may conjure up a midcentury malt shop tableau—part Archie comic, part Happy Days—the roots of the American soda fountain run much deeper, and much darker. Carbonated water has been prized for its curative power for millennia, but commercial fountains, which claimed to artificially reproduce the benefits of spring waters, didn’t become widespread until the first quarter of the 19th century—and then were marketed primarily for their medicinal, not pleasure-giving, properties. In fact, it was because of soda water’s perceived therapeutic benefits that fountains ended up in drugstores.
It would be almost impossible to overstate the popularity of the soda fountain during its turn-of-the-century heyday: By the end of the 1800s, most U.S. towns contained at least one soda fountain (New York City alone is estimated to have had more than 670), and by 1920 their ranks had swelled to 125,000.
Can an industry so defined by the past have an innovative future? If Darcy O’Neil, the bartender and blogger behind the website Art of Drink, has a say, phosphates, lactarts, and other fountain drinks may soon enjoy a revival.
(via Lost at E Minor)
Italian artist Guido Daniele creates the most surreally brilliant portraits of wild animals using little more than body paint and a hyper-realistic imagination.
All sorts of frightening/remarkable.
