Bloom Magazine launched by one of the most famous trend forecasters, Lidewij Edelkoort.  This blog posting is an excerpt from Bloom Magazine article “Newer flower Children”.  “The flower child is back.  The signs are around us: along with the rise of the musical genre known as freak folk and the nature-espousing counterculture that goes with it, we live at a time of defiance by hair. “

Everywhere you look you see dreadlocks, beards, and fantastical moustaches.  Hair is being employed as a tool of expression and rebellion, an assertion of values that go counter the status quo.

“Over the past several years we’ve seen a re-awakening of responsibility for the environment, a desire to live simpler lives, a revival of community, an appreciation for the handmade, the small-scale and the humble, all symptoms of an urgent realization that it’s time to seriously confront our more serious habits as a species. It’s if the flower-child ethos took a break for fifty years, re-emerging in a more developed form when the world had reached a new pinnacle of self-destructiveness and was particularly in need of its values”

“The flower-child spirit of our time has become a more savvy beast - updated, re-imagined, but familiar.  Could this be the decade where people finally get serious about turning things around?”

June 30, 2011 by Designsquish

Laneways of Oak Bay and Fairfield, Summer 2010. 
(Laneways are narrow alleys behind buildings common in British Columbia, Canada.)

Photographs by Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) artist Ali Bosworth.
-http://www.alibosworth.com/

June 23, 2011 by Designsquish

Above: DIY wooden toy car

Above: DIY scarecrow

Above: DIY sleds

Above: DIY bird feeder

Above: DIY stool

Above: DIY bench

-DIY Russia on folkforms

June 21, 2011 by Designsquish

Great way to save space and reuse/store old magazines:

- http://www.njustudio.com/index.php?/project/hockenheimer/

June 15, 2011 by Designsquish

Above: Rhododendrons blooming everywhere.

Above: Blueberries.  Not yet ripened

Carless days. Catching a train from New York City,  Penn Station to Sloatsburg then hiking to Harriman State Park(Upstate New York)

June 11, 2011 by Designsquish

by Designsquish

by Designsquish

Fresh poppy seeds - delicious! Beautiful photography by Inmost Light

Above:  Inmost Light

June 08, 2011 by Designsquish

Avoska, translated as “just in case” is a Russian net bag.  Avoska collapses to fit inside your fist and expands to hold 12 grapefruits. It is easy to wash and boxes edges do not rip it’s threads. Best of all, it prevents plastic bags from gathering in your kitchen corner or the world’s landfills.  With the popularization of plastic bags after the 90’s (after the fall of Soviet Union) avoska bags gradually went into disuse in Russia.

Above: Russia 1959. People carrying avoska bags. Photo: Carl Mydans.

Contemporary Russian folklore:  Once upon a time in Russia there lived a simple little net bag - Avoska. Everyone loved her.  People took her with them everywhere - to the store, farmers market and even birthdays. But then….plastic bags came and people forgot about Avoska.  To see what happens next watch this really adorable 3 minute film on Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/avoska

Above: Boy hugging avoska bag from short “Avoska” film (See above)

Read blog dedicated to Avoski:  http://avoski.livejournal.com/

June 07, 2011 by Designsquish

Thirty five leaves silhouettes can be found on http://forestry.about.com

June 04, 2011 by Designsquish

Rainbow Gatherings are temporary intentional communities usually held in outdoor settings, and espousing and practicing ideals of peace, love, harmony, freedom and community, as a consciously expressed alternative to mainstream popular culture, consumerism, capitalism and mass media…Rainbow Gatherings are an expression of a Utopian impulse, combined with bohemianism, hipster and hippie culture, with roots clearly traceable to the 1960’s counterculture. Mainstream society is commonly referred to and viewed as “Babylon”, connoting the participants’ widely held belief that modern lifestyles and systems of government are unhealthy, unsustainable, exploitative and out of harmony with the natural systems of the planet….The first Rainbow Gathering, a four-day event in Colorado in July 1972, was organized by youth counterculture “tribes” based in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. - wiki

- Rainbow Gathering album on flickr by photographer Benoit Paillé

June 01, 2011 by Designsquish