Low art china cabinet

My parents have a china cabinet, full up of all the ancestral stuff. In my life, a china cabinet would be inappropriate. Such a severe piece of furniture would put my plastic cups and mismatched mugs to shame. Below is my answer to display storage. It has the same function as a china cabinet, that of showing off my tableware, but lacks the gravitas of more traditional styles. Mine is made of milk crates and the slats from a broken IKEA bed. It's held together by nuts, bolts and some truly massive washers. I quite like it. It isn't, however, new, only newly documented. It was built in either late 2007 or early 2008. But I've been on a documentation spree lately, so here it is.

Umbrella Lamp

Close to a year ago, I made the umbrella lamp. I'm posting it now because I've finally gotten around to documenting. It's fairly simple. The umbrella lamp is an old IKEA lamp with some bits removed and an equally old umbrella that's undergone much the same treatment. The light bounces off the umbrella spines, creating a slightly sparkly effect. It also casts a pretty excellent shadow. In short, dismembered IKEA lamp + broken umbrella = umbrella lamp.

Consigned

Here's an idea for an art piece. A lot of beer tends to get consumed at the openings of shows. The idea of the piece (which would be called Consigned) is to take all of the empties from the opening party and stack them up in a corner into a pyramid of beer bottles. It's like the huge piles of bottles that collect after house parties, waiting to be returned for the deposit. The pile would also include the consumption of the artist over the course of the show. After the closing party, when the show is being torn down, the bottles will be returned for the deposit, which would then be given back to the gallery.

Books for walls

For several months, my living room has looked like a disaster, thanks to a particularly nasty shade of red on the walls. I'm not keen on painting a small room in a colour dark enough to cover the red. That means that my only real option is wallpaper. But wallpaper is expensive. Solution? Cover the walls in the pages of cheap, second hand teeny bopper romance novels. Six books (that's roughly 1200 pages) and 2L of podge later, two out of four walls are done. Once all four walls are done, up go the shelves and on with the books that are more for reading than tearing apart.

The joys of fridge ownership

I've been working on a wallpapering project involving old books and my currently uninspiring living room. I'm afraid it's made me a little glue happy. I realized last night that the big perk of owning a fridge (as opposed to having one provided by my landlord) is being able to modify it. So: old Archie comics Mod Podged to my decrepit fridge.

eWaste iWaste

Yet more illustration backlog. Reasonably self explanatory title. Two page graphic for a feature article about ewaste.

Insta-rugged bulletin board

More in my crusade to spruce up the blank walls in my hallway: I came back from Expozine this year with lots of things that desperately wanted to be pinned to a bulletin board. Real cork boards are, of course, too expensive. Padded, fabric covered boards are far too fussy for my tastes. Solution: Rip a box apart. Corrugated cardboard has a nice, industrial look to it. Nail some strips to the wall and bam! Insta-rugged bulletin board.

Fork bookmark

Idea: Make bookmarks out of cheap cutlery. Cheap stainless steel cutlery is thin and easy to manipulate. Just hammer the curves out of a fork or spoon and you have a handy, awesome bookmark. Pictures when I make one.

Grocery Lists Quarterly

A set of assumptions and an idea:

1. Copyright is automatic. Authors do not need to register their work, they simply need to publish in order to be protected by copyright.
2. Publication can mean all sorts of things, not just books (in the case of print work).
3. Grocery lists are original creative works. They are a product of the imagination given literary form. In form and content, they aren't very different from some types of poetry.
4. Writing down a grocery list constitutes publication.

All of the above has been making me think for a while that I should be making sure to release my grocery lists into the public domain. But then, the question is, what's the point? Other than whimsy, is there a good reason to release something as ephemeral as a grocery list into the public domain? If there's only one copy, and that copy will be thrown out after use, is there a point in releasing grocery lists? So, I've come up with the following idea:

Grocery Lists Quarterly will be a zine devoted to grocery lists. It will be packed full of scans of real grocery lists. Grocery Lists Quarterly will provide intriguing snapshots of life, the tiny stories told by grocery lists. If you feel moved to contribute your lists, do send to groceries@adaptstudio.ca

Spoon napkin ring

Yet another use for old spoons: Supremely awesome napkin rings.

Door bed

This is something I've been meaning to make for a while: Get some old doors (maybe six or so) from the ReStore or some other similar used hardware place. Take two and attach them together, side by side, with something quite strong like a few strips of metal bolted legthwise across the join. Do the same thing with two more. Stand the two sets of double doors up on end about six feet away from each other. Take the remaining two doors, with their long edge on the ground, and attach them to the double doors so that they form a box type configuration. Strong hardware is a good idea. After that, just throw some rails and slats into the whole thing. Ta da! Bed made of old doors. It's sturdy, it's more interesting than an IKEA bed frame, and it's cheap, too. Now I just need to get around to making it.