Scrap wood chair. (Perfect DIY idea)

Skateboard wheels rotating table. (Great idea for reusing skateboard wheels)

Button toy. (Great idea for reusing buttons)

Future Perfect is a good new design store in
Williamsburg and East Village, New York.

May 26, 2010 by Designsquish

Signe Parsegel land art.

Forest Art Wisconsin.

Michel de Broin “Superficial”

May 18, 2010 by Designsquish

Lamp made from scrub pads and chandelier made from
plastic spoons by Daisuke Hirawa.

Tiago Sa Da costa creates bowls and lamps out of natural material - cork. 

Hand knitted recycled cotton and leather bags by Lana Williams

Colorful, environmentally friendly wood blocks by Miller Goodman.

Scrap Lights made of recycled cardboard.

by Designsquish

Log speakers by Stanley Ruiz - http://stanleyruiz.com  Stanley’s speakers are composed of only wood and metal. “It is a very lo-fi, unassuming approach to product design.  Improvisation is a major part of my process” - Stanley.

Ceramic speakers by Joey Roth: 

The speaker system is reduced to its most simple form.  It is also made out of all natural materials consisting of porcelain, cork, and birch.

May 14, 2010 by Designsquish

Irina paints on old wood boards, closet and wardrobe doors, metal pieces or simply on rocks she finds.  Irina’s paintings remind of Russian Orthodox icons, Avant-garde 1910-1920 and Russian folk art.  She paints portraits of Russian writers, happy couples, books, subjects and objects from villages and dacha life.  Irina says: The objects I paint on are just means of expression but their past affects my paintings. I find them in the garbage ...or they find me.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, portrait. 2004. Oil on reclaimed wood. From “Russian Writers” series.

Requiem. Series of portraits. 2000-2001. Oil on wood

Nikolai Semyonovish Leskov, portrait. 2004 from “Russian Writers” series.

Sugar. 2002. Oil on found metal.

Beloved vegetable garden. 1995. Oil on wood.

May 10, 2010 by Designsquish

Reused shipping crate shelves / drawers by Linda Jose.  Furniture designed to reuse shipping crates.

May 08, 2010 by Designsquish

April 26, 2010 by Designsquish

Sculpture by Michel de Broin made from discarded batteries.

April 19, 2010 by Designsquish

Located on the Rockaway Peninsula Brooklyn, NY, Fort Tilden is mostly a natual area that was a former United States Army installation.  Fort Tilden today is largely a natural area of beach, dunes and maritime forest. Most of the old military installations are abandoned, though some buildings have been renovated and are used by local arts groups. Atop one of the old batteries, Battery Harris East, is a viewing platform offering 360-degree views.  Fort Tilden includes some of the most secluded beaches in New York.

by Designsquish

“Biopsy” photograph series by Yedda Morrison

This work takes as its starting point the human desire for permanence, a desire made acute by the inevitability of our passing. If photography itself is a manifestation of this desire, our attempt to arrest or “still life,” plastic plants and flowers are a low-rent corollary. Suspended mid bloom and scattered throughout graveyards and empty parlors, they offer the promise of perennial youth, an eternal flowering, life ever after. Fake flowers both immortalize and render static the natural world. As such, they articulate a crisis between beauty and horror, desire and loss, artificiality and “the natural.” In our fall from the “pre” or “no” time of Eden, we have landed squarely in the artificial garden, the stilled remains of paradise. These sights of frozen or no time and the scale, duration and technology that make them possible, work to articulate a world where boundaries between the real and the artificial are increasingly blurred. If, in our contemporary moment, we are experiencing a gradual substitution of the machine for the body/mind, the image for the thing, and the simulation of the environment for the environment itself, then perhaps we are realizing Robert Smithson’s “frozen actuality,” the hallucinatory disjunction where “nothing is known but the impenetrable surfaces,” where “the artificial ingenuity of time allows no return to nature.”

April 13, 2010 by Designsquish

Old rusty bike found on garage sale restored and repainted in the Gzhel style of ceramics. Gzhel is a Russian style of ceramics which takes its name from the village of Gzhel and surrounding area, where it has been produced since 1802.

April 08, 2010 by Designsquish

Brooklyn Bridge Park is an 85-acre park currently under construction on the Brooklyn waterfront in the vicinity of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. As of March 22, 2010 the first newly built section of the park, Pier 1, has been open to the public. !!!!!!!!!!!!

March 30, 2010 by Designsquish

Reused shipping crate wood for shelves, glasses and cups from grandma’s garage, flea market or thrift store and a few handmade ceramic bowls.
Done!

Image found on beautiful blog by Anna Rikje, photographer and musician from Germany currently living in New York City -  I Truly Like That.

by Designsquish

The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs.

Above: Mohawk Dinosaur

Scientsts were able to assign color to individual feathers and thus work out color patterns for the entire fossil of Anchiornis huxleyi, a small, feathered, two-legged dinosaur that lived roughly 150 million years ago.  The animal would have weighed about four ounces (110 grams) and appears to have had a dark gray or black body and wings with some white feathers that gave it a stripe pattern, plus a reddish-brown crest and speckles on the face. ( Source:  New York Times and Discovery News)

by Designsquish

Early spring moss in upstate New York. 

March 21, 2010 by Designsquish

Sets of mismatched dining chairs. Life becomes much easier with mismatch!  Photos from Emma Blog, unpolished Life and Apartment Therapy.

March 10, 2010 by Designsquish

I see a lot of old beautiful bird cages in the garbage. I think I threw out a few as well a long long time ago. What I did not know is that they can be transformed into beautiful lamps. This re-purposed bird cage lamp above is by PSPCA ( Philadelphia Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).  The curtain will naturally diffuse the light acting as a lamp shade!

by Designsquish

International Women’s Day vintage spring and flowers postcards.  (С 8 Марта!)

March 08, 2010 by Designsquish

How to hand build your own well!!! (in Russian): www.kolodec.ru

by Designsquish

I was excited to find these great “Recycled Banner Golden Mean Messenger Bags”  DIY instructions a la Freitag bike messenger bags.  (Can be made under $5 !!!!!!!!!!!!!). Comfortable, light, tough billboard sign material (waterproof). To view instructions please visit: EEIO Golden Mean messenger bag instructions
In stores, nice bike messenger bags can be $200. Making your own not only saves money but also is good for environment.  I just saw a truck driver discard a big piece of truck tarpaulin and now it is lying on the street waiting to be made into bags.

March 03, 2010 by Designsquish

“I have been trying to visually find a means to express the turbulence, sadness and strange beauty that comes with personal struggles, relationships and dealing with one’s own personal history in a more poetic way. Whenever something arises in my life that is profound, I find that nature always mimics it, and some of the shots I take grow into more rich personal symbols as time advances. I am interested in this use of image as a sort of personal time-capsule of my own struggles with anxiety, self-doubt and frustration”  - Allison

http:/allisonbeonde.com

February 23, 2010 by Designsquish

Black Pine Books makes these beautiful high-quality, affordable alternatives to more mass-produced journals. Recycled papers are utilized when possible and all items are entirely hand-made.
Moss and Khaki notebooks are made from recycled paper and have light gray paper( 80 pages). They are saddle-stitched (also known as staple-bound)
The Dusk (Navy) journals have hand-sewn binding,  heavy dark blue cover stock and the inside has a narrow-ruled, blue lined paper (80 pages). Comes with the option of a hand-made band, which helps keep the book flat when not in use.

http://www.blackpinebooks.com/

February 20, 2010 by Designsquish

November Meteors

Mare Humorum. From Study made in 1875.

Sun as Revealed by Telescope and Spectroscope

by Designsquish

White Wolf in Mossland, chromogenic print

Canadian artist Adam Makarenko creates series of dioramas which are then photographed with altered perspective.  Influenced by science and nature, Adam creates photographs concerned with human manipulation of nature.

Pursuit, chromogenic print

Cessna, archival pigment print

HWY Drive, chromogenic print

There is a raven on our way down the northern highway

Adam grew up in Atikokan, Northern Ontario, where the caribou once roamed. “When Adam was growing up there, Atikokan was coated in red ore dust, and boasted two of the largest ore mines in the world. It was nestled in the heart of the Northern Ontario wilderness, isolated from the rest of the world. In 1980 the mines shut down, and it was at that point when Adam began to nurture his artistic ideas by exploring fields of endless moss, muddy swamps, thick boreal forests, and abandoned open pit mines” - from website.

February 18, 2010 by Designsquish

Spring Beauty
1943

Found on EMPIRICISM, new blog aimed at keeping track of all things beautiful, innovative or interesting.

by Designsquish

LED lamp by Brooklyn based designer Stanley Ruiz,  inspired by fabrication techniques of indigenous peoples.  An energy efficient LED strip is encased in felt, taking advantage of felt’s quality of being a fire-retardant material. 
The lamp was designed to reduce a task lamp to its bare essential- reducing the components and eliminating the use of complex machinery in production.

February 17, 2010 by Designsquish

I actually do not remember where I found this post card or who made it but I really love it.

February 14, 2010 by Designsquish

I love these computer-graphic-design-font-inspired eco-friendly pillows! Pillow sets are made from 100% recycled Plastic bottles Eco Felt .
Eco felt letter pillows by Alexandra Ferduson and Ctrl Alt Del soft pillows by Diffraction Fiber. 

February 10, 2010 by Designsquish

February 05, 2010 by Designsquish

Flower baskets made from old apple and wine crates.

February 02, 2010 by Designsquish