They're coming to get you Barbara

Tis my favorite day of the year. Seriously. I work at this place that’s pretty lame about Halloween, and long for the old days of being Chopped Up Chad with my friend Decapitated Deanna all day at work. Anyway, today is about weird creepy things.

I found this way wicked site that’s all skulls. Believe. One image of a skull every day. Check out this chair, mon. You can also pick up that skull font there.

I love these Dvider stickers. We’ll be back to discuss them again in the future, but today it’s about skullz.

Saw this bitchin table at Catherine David Designs. It’s called the Jack in the Box table.

This solar corpse light reminds me of this Marcus the Carcass we used to put up in our front yard… but way cooler, and you know… energy efficient.

Saw this quilt on Apartment Therapy.

Also found this mailbox… Halloawesome! HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Animal Magnetism

Charley Harper’s art is fantastic. To me, it’s the perfect mix of precision and modernism. He can boil down a bird’s body to a perfect minimalist shape, and use true-blue bird colors to bring it to life. This Charley Harper quote sums it up- "I never count the feathers in the wings — I just count the wings." It’s the kind of work that makes one think, “it’s so easy I could do that”- which is what people say when they see a professional baseball player swing a bat and hit a home run.



I’m hoping to get a print or two of his for Christmas as well. It’s quite possibly the greediest I’ve ever been, but with images like these, and names like, “The Family Owlbum” the man is hitting me in the sweet spot.




I also love these paintings… another theme of his it seems. Modern shapes, painted from an off kilter vantage point that makes the viewer go back to the title of the painting for clues to figure out what he/she is looking at. This is The Last Aphid.



Charley Harper and Todd Oldham started collaborating on fabrics and home furnishings before he died on June 10th of this year at the age of 85. I thought I heard Lazy Boy was going to come out with some of these collaborations? Sounds like a recliner for maxin… I’ll add it to the Xmas list for 2008. Dwell Magazine had a nice interview with the man a while back.

Wacky World of Wold

Thomas Wold is kind of my hero. I’d been checking out the ridiculous furniture designs he comes up with for quite some time now. His blog is great, because he goes into great detail about the projects he’s working on, and it gets me fired up to make something wicked rad out of wood. It was this block party bookcase that first caught mine eye over at design public. It has hinged doors, and sliding doors, which is great because bookcases tend to look crappy after stacks of books start piling up every which way- and it looks crazy. Crazy awesome. I wonder how many sell at $4,000 each?




Delving further into this guy’s world, I found this “Fractured Fairy Tales” wall unit Wold created. Now we’re talking! This makes me bow down to both Thomas Wold and the people who asked to have this put in their home as an entertainment center.



It was when I read about this party, that I realized we could be friends with this guy. Anyone who removes all the furniture in his house in order to create a unique party atmosphere in each area, is a person I want to hang out with in my free time. Good thing I’m taking that Woodshop 101 class this weekend… lookout brah, I’ll be nippin at your heels in like.. my next life.

What up, dawg?

I brought our dog Chester to work with me today. It’s nice to have a part of your normal life at dumb old work. He also inspired the post of the day. It’s the pet post.



This door mat kind of cracks me up. Reminds me of emails I get from my friend Nicki kinda… but boiled down into a doormat.




Courtney, ‘nother friend of ours, was just talking about how she’s going to have to start keeping her old cat indoors all the time. Getting too old to run in the rough hood of Silverlake. She wants to keep him entertained, but the idea of getting a scratching post is kind of blugh. How’s about this rad mod one? I mean, if it gets the “Trendy Product of the Month” from Cat Fancy magazine, how can you go wrong?




I’m also a sucker for ridiculous rugs. Here lies one. Awes.

Lastly, tis the season for costumes.

House of Worship

Our friend Dawn knows this dood who attacked an old house in Hyde Park with his dad, brother and a slew of helper-outers, and created this masterpiece. People think that we did a lot of work to our house, but more like… contractors did… and it would be considered the tip of the iceberg compared to the work of this guy, Blake Dollahite.

Soon as my wife forwarded this link to me from Dawn, I thought “Apartment Therapy would eat this UP.” The next day, it was on Design Sponge (with a little help from artist Alyson Fox, Blake’s sister-in-law-to-be), and did get to Apartment Therapy, and several other design type blogs that know when they see something above and beyond average cool.

He used tin from old chicken houses for roofing, and old farm house roofing for his floors, built his own furniture, and did the landscaping. We’ve talked about going to Habitat for Humanity for a new front door, and I think seeing the stuff he got from there, sealed the deal. He has a slew of pictures here, and check out the design sponge sneak peak as well. Way worth it. Blake, I need to learn to build furniture, and you need to teach me. Let me buy a saw, and I’ll be ready to go.

Man Up! Man Up!

Sometimes, after talking about plants, art, interior design-y things, I start to feel like I might as well tattoo a butterfly on the small of my back and subscribe to Oprah’s magazine(s). So today I dude it up a little. With these two items.

Item one is something that I do truly want/need. It’s Hanging Harry! See we have this closet with a very awkwardly placed light that’s really high up, and the pull chain was slapped together with fishing line and a whiffle ball golf ball by the previous owners. A few weeks ago I snapped it with my brute force, and don’t really want to put the whiffle ball golf ball contraption back together, but we do need something. Something read Christmas Gift number 28, the dead-hanging-guy-light-pull-thing.

Item number two is something I’d need today if you know… I hadn’t been married for the past ten years, and had a totally tricked out bachelor pad. I’d have one about every two feet. It’s the stainless steel condom dispenser, because nothing screams high class more than stainless, brah.

Water-free Plantlife

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How do artists work? I feel like I came from this artisty family, but maybe got short changed on those genes? I’d prefer to think they just are lying dormant. Our friend Lisa (who told us about the beer can house in Houston) also has a sister who does these great flower/grass/nature type installations that really rule.

Her name is Amy Albracht, and it’d be cool to have this retractable blossom number on our wall, or that wheat growing out of our floor. This is the type of indoor plantlife we need to take care of, but will probably still kill somehow.

She’s also part of this color consultant group that’s been painting some wicked colors on school walls. I’m just sayin that I hope those artist genes come to the surface quickly because I’m currently labeling mini dv tapes for a living, and I don’t want to pass those kind of genes on to the next sap.

Moderately Mod

I’ve got issues with looking at houses. We bought our house over a year ago, but still think about other houses we saw. Talked to ma yesterday (from whom I’ve inherited the trait of wandering through houses I don’t own) and she told me how “mod” we’ve gone with our house. The truth is our house is far from “mod” in structure, but I guess it’s mod in décor? Yeah, it is. We ended up picking the house we live in because it was well taken care of, in an rad neighborhood, great school district, close to parks, shops, restaurants- but we saw a few houses during the home search that were way more mod than ma could even imagine.

I feel like I forced our real estate lady into checking out this AD Stenger home in Barton Hills. It was the coolest house we saw. If it didn’t need some work, and wasn’t at the top of our price range, I would have bought that bastard and given them my left eye too.
We also saw this house soon as it came on the market. Julie really loved it, and it was great too… also needed some work, but was priced really low, for a sad reason I can’t get into. There was already a bid on the house, and it was snatched up. it was priced in the low 200s, and I heard it was quickly resold for around 400 thousand. Someone took advantage of a really sad situation. There are sharks in these waters I tell ya!
Lastly, we just happened to run across this house in our neighborhood on open house day. Another amazing house, and WAAAAY out of our price range… which doesn’t matter because we aren’t looking… right? It’s just nice to know we live in a town full of great houses to live in, if there’s ever any reason we have to move. Like… our house blows up. I hate moving.

I'm hooked

This would never actually fly at our house, but as I said before, wood is taking over my mind. These days when I make comments about rad woodgrain… whatever… blinds, rugs, coffee cups, toothbrushes, Julie says, “I guess it's cool” because she’s too sweet to say she hates it. When I saw these branch hooks, I was all, “hells yeah.” Above we have a picture of the nasty old hooks we have currently on the back of our bathroom door… I’m sure the 90 year olds that lived in our house before us bought the cheap ones done at the hardware store nearby, because I saw them there. I don’t make a total fuss over them because they are on the back of a door, but if I had some actual wood hooks, I’d hang out behind the door more often. You can buy the hooks, and other wooden items here, or just find you some branches and make em. Ain’t nothing cheaper than free.

The Brick that holds Beer

This pretty much rules. The word is that in 1963, Alfred Heineken created the WOBO (World Bottle) after visiting the Caribbean and seeing the beaches were littered with beer bottles (since they didn’t have any means of sending them back), and the lack of housing materials. The company put the kibosh on the idea after making 100,000 bottles. My brother-in-law and I were considering building Austin’s next mammoth condo out of these. Shiner bock bottle caps for shingles. Our friend Lisa also tipped us off to this house down in Houston. It doesn’t let in that sweet green light like a heinie beer bottle, but I’m not saying we won’t check it out next time we’re in Space City! The full story on the WOBO is here at Inhabitat.

Arty Bastard

I’ve been getting into art with a touch of swank these days… Matte Stephens is producing such art. Back in the day, you could only get his stuff over at Velocity… it’s the good stuff. The originals. However, originals come with usually a couple zeros to the left of the decimal point instead of the right. These days though, with the ever powerful etsy, great artists are setting up shop, and cranking out prints of their work as well. I bought my first print of his as a gift for my friend Deanna. Matte sent it off lickety split, I slapped it in a sleek Ikea Ribba frame (Deanna, that’s read “placed it gently in the frame with all the care and love it deserved”), and it looked great. Great art. Great price. Period. Matte, feel free to use that as your new tag line. Check out the man’s blog here and his etsy shop here.

Wood you? I wood!

I’ve had me a serious wood fetish these days. A fetish that has made me even check into taking some classes in woodworking. How do people make such great looking stuff? How do they bend wood into crazy shapes? Beats me, but I’m on it…kinda. Not really, but at least I know where classes are held right? So if I combine that fetish, with my need to get some plants in our house, and the fact that Christmas is coming up, and people might buy me presents, I bring you Jamali Garden. I like this place because:
a. Their stuff rules and
b. Their stuff is reasonable.
They’ve got all sorts of garden type items, but I’m really liking their natural pots. All rad wood, and all good prices! My current pick is this Kiri wood tray. It’s 12 bucks, and has a zinc liner to plop your plants in. These days when my wife and I see something we’d like to buy, it ends up being approximately 100 times the amount of money we’d actually spend… That might be a slight exaggeration, but I wouldn’t be surprised if just the zinc tray was twice as much, that’s all I’m saying. Mom, if you are out there, December 25th is basically right around the corner.

Hack it!

Got a Eurway catalog the other day with this media storage center job in it. 459 smakkas. Brah, I fold. My fave new place to go these days is Ikea Hackers. They take your basic ikea treasure, soup it up, and presto change o, you have a unique piece all your own that is not only cooler than your average ikea piece, but you still have mad cash to burn.

I followed these fairly explicit directions that hacked an Ikea Lack Shelving Unit, spiced it up with some Capita legs, and ended up with this little marvel that now presides in our living room.


Saved ourselves about 300 bucks... And the remote works through the opaque doors. Holla!

What?

Julie's gonna be pissed. She thinks blogging is retarded. She's also on Good Reads so who is she to talk?