Knotical

Last year Linda and I went to a garage sale up in Falmouth, Maine. The garage was really a newly built barn, with pulleys and hanging canoes and kayaks, snowboards, skis, etc... of a very outdoorsy family. Mixed in with some newer furniture and knick knacks were some old camping equipment and these intricately knotted, awesome, immense macrame rope hangings. The man told me they were made by his late father while at sea as an officer in the Navy during World War II, during the down time, as knot practice. These are the type of beautiful, cool, handmade, one-of-a kind things we love finding, and as much as we would've liked to have kept the pair together, at 20 dollars each, both were unfortunately out of our budget, even for masterpieces of American maritime craft (it was a lean year). So we chose the more intricate one with the three baskets, and drove away, my face symbolically pressed forlornly against the back window. 

Then, as luck would have it, a few weeks ago the same family had another sale, and the other macrame was still there, draped over a canoe, apparently unwanted by anyone but us, and this time for 10 dollars- a nice reward for spending the past year on the widow's walk.

The things they carried

Never able to pass up an interesting bag at a yard sale, we've accumulated kind of a lot, especially of the canvas/tote variety. Most are kept in the car (ostensibly) to make grocery shopping more fun, and to convince Linda that they're actually useful and we should probably keep buying them, unlike the giant leather gladstone bags she's put the kibosh on.

1. An old heavy canvas workhorse, stencilled "Dennet's Wood-Yard", used for hauling coal way back when, with convenient handles on the bottom for dumping everything out. Soon to be filled with wooden blocks.

2. L.L. Bean zippered duffles. At one time we had about 14 of these, my reasoning being that at some conceivable point years from now, it would be fun to send our conceivable son off on a hypothetical Boy Scout trip and outfit the whole Troop with old Bean duffles, but realistically when that day comes I'm sure he'd rather have a Transformers backpack, or whatever's popular, or at least a normal hands-free backpack (which we also have...), or, ideally, take one of these and and sew Lego: The Movie patches all over it.

3. An old Liddesdale (Scotland) Creel. This was at a stoop sale, and the woman who had it said "Oh I used to use that all the time back when everybody had those!" I didn't ask, but I assumed it was the late 70's Stephanie Powers/William Holden-early Banana Republic-Safari time.

4. Museum of Modern Art bag. Probably from the same time period as above. The leather band goes all the way around, and the stitching has come loose, so it acts interestingly like a canvas totebag in a leather sling.

5. The big bag is an old LL Bean boat-and-tote, watertight for filling with ice or bailing out your sinking ship. This one is from the 60's and stiffened in this shape from years of salt water interaction. In front of it is a neat compartmentalized tote, specifically for going out in risky weather. Like our unpictured collection of "Le Bag"s and old Channel 13 (Herb Lubalin) totes, we're fans of type on bags, and "raincoat" in Hot Dog font was too funny. Lastly a well-worn denim and leather bag made in 1960's Massachusetts.

6. Tracey Emin's "This Way Mice" (there's a cat on the other side) tote bag from the 2007 Venice Biennial, thoughtfully brought back by our friend Friederike.

Finally, a nice article by Zachary Sachs about Dmitri Siegel's enlightening article on Design Observer about the proliferation of canvas tote bags. Here.

Volleyball

Spider webs and a mooring buoy.

(click to enlarge)

Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found- back cover

Here's Linda's awesome design for the back cover of Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found, inspired by a combination of Roald Dahl, Let It Bleed, and Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, featuring the basketball hoop table project (page 66) and a much-scaled-down, gravity-defying, exploded-view of the Chaiseburger project (page 40).

WM'T&F comes out September 1st.

Useful things on the side of the road

If this were a yard sale we would have bought nearly everything. As it happens, what we did take were the old rubber hose, since our cheap store-bought one popped a few days ago, and you can't beat the fleshy patina on this one, the basket, which, we're not so much into baskets, but this one had been in a fire and looked kind of cool in a Maarten Baas/Maarten Baas' mother way, and it smelled great. 

Not smelling great however was the overflowing plastic bag of damp Fozzie Bear-like sheepskin, but a few weeks hanging outside on the porch and a few bottles of Febreeze should freshen it up. 

Sometimes we're not sure of what to do with any of this, but if we ever need it it's there. Or conversely, we didn't know we needed it until we found it. For example, we didn't know that a perfect Halloween costume would be a ginger Chewbacca sitting in a gold directors chair with his entrails hanging out holding a burned basket of candy. Imagine seeing that when you open the door.

Waal Aart

Alvar Aalto table and chairs, $40, originally bought in the 70's from Placewares in Boston. To find them at a yard sale was definitely a windfall, even though we have nowhere to put them right now. But the legs and backs easily unscrew, and there are plenty of them, so we could make a wall installation like the one at the Aalto Museum in Finland (below). However, it might be fun to use just the seats and top, in the shape of a giant kitty paw (see also)

(bottom photo by ettubrute)

Crumblin'

patina

Moorings

around The Moorings, Islamorada, Florida. 

A nice escape from that last post.

Just for the articles.

Farm Fresh

Mysterious Eastern origins, thin, ragged edges, great patinas, and the aroma of 50 years of chickens and goats laying on them. Luckily we planned on keeping them outside on the porch anyway, in a kind of Moorish hangout we're making.  But, word to the wise- if you don't have a high-powered hose or access to a DIY carwash I would not buy anything that's been around a barnyard for any period of time, especially Persian rugs.

Historic Design in Printing

A beautiful book, Historic Design in Printing by Henry Lewis Johnson, $1 from a yard sale last weekend. 

Printed in 1923, it essentially espouses the virtues of decoration and ornamentation in book design, through a slew of 16th century graphics, Johnson's smoothly explanatory text, and a well-curated selection of quotes from graphic designers, typographers, writers, and artists of the day. Here are some good ones:

"We know that the letters of the alphabet were once pictures, symbols, or abstract signs of entities and actions, and grew more and more abstract until they became arbitrary marks- the familiar characters that we know. Letters formed into words; words increased and multiplied with ideas and their interchange; ideas and words growing more and more abstract until the point is reached when the jaded intellect would fain again return to picture in writing, and welcomes the decorator and the illustrator to relieve the desert wastes of words marshalled in interminable columns on the printed page."

-Walter Crane

"Ornamental art, pure and simple, is like the measure and rhythm of a verse. A verse may scan, may have a proper accent and cadence. In short, may have all the music of harmonious versification, and yet be made up of words which are mere nonsense; and so in ornament, it is not necessary to its beauty, as ornament, that it should have any meaning. It is quite sufficient that it should be beautiful."

-F.W. Moody

"Originality is a quality which is very much misunderstood. It is in truth easy enough to be original if one does not mind being ridiculous. If any man was master of Renaissance ornament it was surely Alfred Stevens; yet the number of fresh ornamental motives which he was able to produce during his lifetime can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand."

-G. Woolliscroft Rhead (author of Chats on Costume)

"To follow precedent wisely does not mean to imitate slavishly one great exemplar, but to study all masters faithfully, letting their great achievements sink slowly into the mind in order that we may patiently derive from the richness of our acquired knowledge and organized system an attitude of our own." 

- Lindsay Swift

and

"The successful designer should have a thorough knowledge of the historic styles, not for the purpose of reproducing their forms, but in order to discover for himself he methods by which the old artists arrived at the successful treatment of nature and of former styles, so that by the application of his knowledge, derived from the study of nature and he works of former artists, he may be enabled to give to the world some original and interesting work."

-James Ward

There are plenty more, all equally thought-provoking and inspiring. The ornaments and type designs are fantastic and so well laid out and printed, but ironically it's the writing that was the page turner. 

New Painting

Italy (detail)

Our print shop will be up and operational next week.

C'etait un Rendezvous

Rendez-vous (Claude Lelouch 1976)

Early one August morning in 1976 the French director Claude Lelouch mounted a camera to the front of his Ferrari and filmed his breakneck drive through the streets of Paris, from Porte Dauphine to Sacre Coeur. After "C'etait un Rendezvous" was shown publicly Lelouch was arrested and the car confiscated.

Not long after it was released our local library had a copy, and my brother and I used to get our dad to rent it constantly, every chance we got. Back then renting movies was a little more complicated, as the movie was an actual big can of film, and my dad would have to lug out the movie projector and thread the film, while we'd set up the giant silver screen on its rickety aluminum tripod. But when the lights went out and the movie started rolling, nothing beat sitting on the carpet staring up at the screen with a permanent smile for 9 minutes, the smell of dusty electricity, the smooth clacking of the projector, and the loud Ferrari engine blaring through the steel speakers.
Happy Bastille Day!

wind, sand, stars, and clubs

Antoine De Saint-Exupery and Ludwig Bemelmans, two wonderful author/illustrators, from L'Ecole Francaise du Maine's yard sale in Freeport. (Actually it was at the church across the street; but for context's sake...)

Wary Meyers Print Shop

Is now open!

Click the pic to go there.

The Rain in Maine

Another lame forecast again this weekend, to add to the already drenched summer.

Above: A great, huge, older (80's) L.L. Bean umbrella, bought from a nice older (80's) couple who both worked at Bean for years.

Next to that is a really nice Swaine, Adeney, Brigg, and Sons, Ltd. fortuitously found at a yard sale last summer when we were looking specifically for umbrellas to stick in Tossed & Found's umbrella holder project. Interestingly at the time we were also working on a project called the Eiffel Mantel, which involved hammering hundreds of nails into 1x2 boards, a la Enzo Mari, who wrote, "...two nails should never be planted along the same grain of wood." Advice Swaine & co. should've heeded when they nailed their name plate onto the handle. (click to enlarge).

$1.50 and $3, respectively.

Enzo Mari

Soul Power

The Salty Sea

From a quick trip out to Long Island (Maine) on the 4th-

1. speedboat

2. The Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt's sailor. When I lived in Italy I had a girlfriend who wrote his name, in gum, on the bottom of a bookshelf. The shelf was only about 2 feet over her face when she was in bed, and before she fell asleep each night she'd stick her gum on it. I remember she proudly showed me the multicolored cursive Corto Maltese, among other dots and asterisks and swirls. 

3. A broken stool at the boatyard. I actually took this photo last year, and the stool was going to turn into a bike rack for Tossed & Found, but I left it on the island and never found it again. 

4. The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Alexander Calder. We found this at the bottom of a box, at a yard sale with kids, kids, everywhere. 

5. The ferry back, Casco Bay looking a little like the Mekong, with a crowded whale watch boat.

Bachelor keeps house

A view of my old apartment. I know this looks more low-life than high life, but it did have a cool, 70's-Laurel Canyon quality to it, and got me a few early jobs where people wanted, believe it or not, the same look. Not easy to acheive, as you need a certain patience, or laziness, not to water a spider plant that's hanging next to a sink. 

This came to mind because we're reorganizing, and that David Hamilton photo was in our guest room, above the bed (see below). I don't know what ever happened to the Miller can-in-a-bottle, times were tough- it may have been returned as a two-fer.

ex libris

Time for a new chapter in the guest room/library.

Tomorrow we're dismantling it and bringing the bed and furniture downstairs for the new guest apartment, which should be a pretty fun project. This upstairs room will turn into something completely different.

It'll be nice to free up the space- the bed is looking a little Erwin Wurm-ly, and there are four pieces of nice George Nelson furniture, books galore, and an old Pfaff leather sewing machine that all need some newfound appreciation. On the other hand it'll be somewhat sad to uproot them, as their Sanford & Sonned arrangements are part of what gave the room its Gypsy/Bohemian charm.