ready, set, go!
The ladies who started Readymade magazine in Berkeley have been all over the airwaves lately--yesterday they were on KQED's radio show with Michael Krasny doing an interview, and today they were on NPR talking up their new book Readymade: How To Make (Almost) Anything. I used to have a subscription to the Readymade magazine, which can range from really wonderful recycled craftiness to sometimes irritating yuppy snarkiness on design issues. I think part of what bugged me is that they would show pictures of lamps made out of soda bottles photographed in a sparse and sleek Eames-style loft which made it look totally rad and uber-designy. But I knew that when the same item was placed in my shabbylicious house, it would look, well, sort of crappy, not cool.
Oh well! But I think I'm falling sway to their new book, which will come out soon and is a compilation of all these cool handmade things you can make, most out of scraps of other things. I appreciate their ethos and their ideas that design can be handmade and made of recycled stuff. Below are some images from said book, to be purchased shortly be moi.
And, least I forget, when I was in LA a few days ago checking out the "Ecstasy" show at the MOCA Geffen (which I *highly* recommend you see if you can--is it travelling?), the bookstore had a smart little publication by Todd Oldham called "Handmade Modern" that was also rather thrilling. Yet one more thing to get myself wrapped up in down the road! Who doesn't want a faux Isamu Noguchi moonrock sculpture thingie?
4 Comments:
i love readymade!! i'm excited. i made my parents gifts for christmas and i had to sew them all by hand. my mom said she was going to get me a sewing machine so i can sew as much as i want! now i can join the world of DIY. :-D
happy holidays!!!
amee, you NEED a sewing machine! eeek, you really need to get one, girl! i'm glad you're gonna get hooked up with one because it'll be great to see what you'll start whipping up :)
happy holidays to you, too!!!
It's interesting how the idea of reusing old objects in new ways is now considered hip--which is a good thing, if that encourages more people to be mindful of the choices that they have when they consume.
But it's also interesting because I just came back from visiting my in-laws, who are able to live a middle-class lifestyle largely because they do a lot of their shopping at flea markets rather than at retail. A brand-new DVR is a Christmas gift luxury, but for clothing or pots and pans, it's the flea market. And they've been doing it for years.
yep, i hear ya...as a little girl we were living a welfare lifestyle, which ingrained in me an almost neurotic penny-pinching recycling, reusing, and saving ethos (it gets kind of maddening, actually!). in a way you can say that the reuse aesthetic is both practical and political (for environmental reasons), but then again, folks have always been recyclers for economic reasons. I can only guess that this will happen more and more as people's pocketbooks are squeezed for things like rising oil prices and falling wages!
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