Art

We've seen plenty of excellent work by Washington, D.C.-based Jonah Takagi here and there at various exhibitions and venues over the years, but we finally crossed paths during NY Design Week at a pop-up shop/exhibition for his new-ish retail venture Field. Although he launched the company with childhood friend Daniel Thomas last year, Here & There marked first major event in New York, a collaboration between the D.C.-and-Chicago-based brand and NYC's Various Projects, who stock some of the carefully curated goods at their flagship store in the Lower East Side, Project No. 8. Billed simply as "an exhibition featuring an array of artists and designers invited to create objects on the theme of travel," the exhibition was a highlight of this year's design festivities. Posters by Timothy Colmant(more...)

I went to blog yesterday, and thought something along the lines of "Holy sheep, I have nothing knitty to show you" and then realized that this is life, and no - I'm not making enormous progress on the fibre front,...

If you knit a lot of large projects – or projects involving more than one skein of yarn, you have encountered the step of switching from one skein of yarn to another mid-project. This is called a ‘join’ or a ‘tie-on’ in knitting lingo, and there are a lot of different ways to do it. You might know twelve different ways. It’s also entirely possible that you’ve been sort of Macguyver-ing this step and are convinced there is a better way to do it than your way. If you’re happy with the results you’ve been getting, by all means keep doing it. Truthfully, you’ve got many fun options available to you, including simply dropping the old yarn and picking up the new one and returning later on to weave in the ends. There’s also the tried-and-true method of overlapping the incoming and exiting yarns with each other (holding them both yarns together and knitting a few stitches with both), or the approach of tying a square knot between the exiting and incoming tails of yarn, proceeding by knitting with the new yarn. I’ve used both of these options before, and they work just fine. The main downside with both of these options is that they  involve coming back later to deal with the ends. If you’re working with 100% wool, more methods are available to you – in particular, the spit splice. Strands of wool (and it must be 100% regular wool, not superwash wool or wool blended with other things) have the ability to get fuzzy and friendly with other strands of wool. The same qualities, incidentally, that allow wool to felt – the planned and purposeful version of shrinking a piece of knitting – allow you to execute a spit splice.  Just as any kind of wool felting involves three steps: moisture, heat, and friction, a spit splice also needs all of these things! If you’re not familiar with this join, here’s how it goes: (I grabbed this yarn from my leftovers bin, but in case you’ve fallen in love with it, it’s Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, in ‘amethyst.’) 1. First, separate the plies of your wool yarn at the ends (as pictured above). The yarn pictured is 4-ply which means I could actually go in and tease out all 4 individual plies on each of the two ends, but as you’ll see, separating the plies into 2 sections each does just fine. And, if you had a 2-ply yarn, you’d only be able to separate it out into 2 individual plies anyway. 2. Next, arrange these unwoven plies so that they are overlapping and getting friendly with each other. Again, you can be as meticulous or non-meticulous as you want. Mostly you just want the plies from one end to intermingle with the plies from the other end. 3. Apply the moisture required for the felting step – yes, this is the step where you actually spit on the yarn! If you’d prefer not to get quite that personal with your wool, you can apply water or run it under the tap, but I have no shame in admitting my splices are happily infused with my own spit. (I really put as much of myself into my knitting work as I can.) You can also just lick the whole thing in your mouth if you want – it doesn’t take long and is quite effective, although you do of course risk getting a fuzzy tongue. (God I can’t wait to see the search strings that result from this post. I’m so sorry, blog.) 4. Finally, you’re going to apply the friction and heat at the same time, by rubbing the splice vigorously between your hands. This is going to take vigorous motion (i.e. more briskly than rolling a rolling pin), but will not take you very long. I bet this must look really fun to kids. Heck, grown-ups have fun with this part. Possibly after the first go you might have a few bunched-up portions, so go back a second or third time to rub those smoothly if you like. Ta-da! A  successful join. The nice thing about this is that you have no ends to weave in afterwards. Once t

Photo by Heather BairdCheesecake is a beautiful thing, but when you add swirls of bright color to the batter it becomes a true work of art. In this cake, citrusy colors reflect bright orange and lemon flavors. It’s completely indulgent and perfect for summer entertaining. Each slice of cake reveals its own unique marbling inside. A knife dipped in warm water and wiped clean before cutting the cake will help prevent the cheesecake from sticking to the knife. This keeps slices neat and reduces the risk of muddying the gorgeous marbling inside and on top. You will need: Crust 1 cup graham cracker crumbs 1 tablespoon sugar 4 tablespoons butter, melted Filling 4 packages (8 oz each) cream cheese, softened 2 eggs, room temperature 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 teaspoons orange extract 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 cup full fat sour cream Yellow and pink food coloring Topping 1 1/2 cups full fat sour cream 1/4 cup sugar Yellow and pink food coloring Preheat oven to 325? Fahrenheit. Whisk the graham cracker crumbs and sugar together in a small bowl. Pour in melted butter and stir until it resembles wet sand. Pour the mixture into a 9-inch springform pan and press into the bottom evenly. Bake for 6 minutes; let cool completely. In a large bowl, beat cream cheese on high speed with a hand mixer until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well with each addition. With the mixer running, gradually add the sugar. In a small bowl, combine the cornstarch, vanilla extract, orange extract and lemon juice; whisk well until smooth. Add to cream cheese mixture. Fold in sour cream with a rubber spatula. Divide batter evenly between three bowls. Add a few drops of yellow food coloring into one bowl of batter and fold together with a rubber spatula. Add a few drops of pink food coloring to another bowl and fold together. Add drops of pink and yellow food coloring to the last bowl and fold together until a consistent orange color is achieved. Pour the three batter colors into one bowl and fold batters together in two folds, or until just swirled together. Pour batter over crust and bake for 45-50 minutes or until just set with a center that slightly jiggles. Let cheesecake cool on a counter top while you prepare the topping. Keep oven heated to 325?F. For the topping, stir together the sour cream and sugar in a medium bowl. Remove 1/2 cup of the mixture and divide between two small bowls (1/4 cup of mixture per bowl). Mix a few drops of pink food coloring into one bowl, and pink and yellow drops in the other bowl. Cover the top of the cheesecake with 1 cup of untinted, sweetened sour cream. Drop spoonfuls of pink sour cream randomly on top of the untinted sour cream. Swirl into the sour cream with a knife. Repeat process with the orange sour cream; swirl well until the entire surface is marbled. Place cheesecake back into the oven for 5-7 minutes to set the topping. Remove from the oven and let cheesecake cool in the pan. Run a thin knife around the edge of the cheesecake and remove the collar of the springform pan. Cut cheesecake into slices with a warm knife. Wipe knife clean between slices.  Refrigerate leftovers. All photographs by Heather Baird. Heather Baird is an accomplished painter and photographer, but her passion is creating eye-popping, mouthwatering desserts. She writes about her adventures in the world of creative dessert-making on her award-winning blog, SprinkleBakes. She is the author of the new baking book, SprinkleBakes: Dessert Recipes to Inspire your Inner Artist. Heather lives in Knoxville, Tennesee, with her husband Mark and two mischievous pugs, Biscuit and Churro.

I am a big fan of risotto. BIG fan. Cheesy, creamy rice? Uh... yes please. I love adding all manner of veggies or shrimp to homemade risotto. Or serving it along side baked fish for dinner. To me, risotto is the fancy restaurant equivalent of macaroni. It's just awesome. A total crowd pleaser.The one complaint I have about risotto is that making it can be a little involved. There's a lot of stirring involved. It's not a dish that you can walk away from, you gotta stay there at the stove stirring for the majority of the time it's cooking. Totally worth it, but this can prove challenging if you are trying to prep other items for a dinner party or just trying to greet guests and not be hidden away in the kitchen the whole time.And so, I thought I'd give baked risotto a try. I had my doubts though. I figured that it would probably be good, but not AS good. How could it be as good if it's less work? That's not how the world works. This is much I know. But I was wrong! Turns out that baked risotto is like baked macaroni—a food miracle. (What? Me? Dramatic? Never.)Baked Risotto, makes 2-3 servings. 2 tablespoons olive oil3 tablespoons chopped onion1 tablespoon minced garlic3/4 cup arborio rice1/2 cup white wine1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese2 cups vegetable stock6 asparagus stocks1/3 cup bread crumbs and/or sesame seeds In an oven safe pan heat the olive oil over medium heat. I like to use a small cast iron pan for baked risotto because it keeps the rice from getting too thick, which can result in uneven cooking. Cook the onion for 2 minutes, just until it begins to soften. Then stir in the garlic and cook for another minute. Lightly season with salt and pepper. Then stir in the rice and cook until it begins to look transparent (about 3-4 minutes).Now pour in the wine and let that cook until nearly all the liquid has evaporated. Stir in 1/4 cup of the cheese and stir in the stock. Cover in aluminum foil (be careful, it's hot!) and bake at 375°f for 10 minutes. Remove the foil and stir in the remaining cheese. Bake for another 15 minutes. In the meantime prep your asparagus by removing the hard ends and slicing in half lengthwise. Layer the asparagus over the risotto, top with bread crumbs and/or sesame seeds and bake for another 8-10 minutes until all the liquid appears to have absorbed.Serve warm as a main course or as a side. You can use any kind of vegetables you prefer. Next time I think I will add some lemon zest! xo. Emma

There’s no question that Lightroom is a powerful piece of photo processing software, but due to that power sometimes it’s not as easy to wrap our heads around everything it has to offer, that’s in part why I started my Let’s Edit YouTube series a weekly segment in which I share my own editing workflow for viewers to learn from. After starting this series one of the most commonly asked questions was to go into more detail on how the sharpening tools in Lightroom work. Sharpening in Lightroom is broken down into four different sliders – Amount, Radius, Detail and Masking – and they each work together to help you achieve the perfect amount of sharpness in your photograph. Today, rather than simply answer this question to the comparatively small group of people over on my site, I thought I’d bring these tips to the dPS community as a whole. I know there are a lot more people out there looking to master the art of sharpening images and I’m happy to help explain them. Before We Get Started There is one thing I’d like to mention before we dive into the tutorial and that is that these tools are designed to help improve an image that is sharp to begin with. They won’t fix camera shake, missed focus points, or poor DOF choices, but rather improve upon an already sharp image. So with that said if you’re struggling to get your image tack sharp you might want to check out this great DPS article on five tips to achieve sharper images first and then head back here to learn how you can make them even better. The Amount Slider As the name implies the amount slider is a broad and general addition or subtraction of the amount sharpening applied to your image. The more you slide to the right the sharper your image will become. It works by increasing the contrast between different pixels in a fairly general way. The next three sliders can help us refine how the amount of sharpening is applied throughout the image. Before we get into those other sliders though I do want to mention that each of these four tools has an extra option attached to it. By using the Alt (windows) or Option (Mac) key on your computer you will be shown an overlay that will help aid you in making better decisions with your sharpening. For the amount slider this option removes the color from the image letting us use a simple gray scale image for sharpening. This is important because some colors can give false sense of sharpness when placed next to each other and can make it difficult to determine the true level of sharpness in the image. The Radius Slider Next in the detail panel is the Radius Slider which lets you control how far away from the center of each pixel the sharpening effect occurs. This is great for determining if you’d prefer a more airy feel (smaller radius) or a more hard edge feel (larger radius). Each photograph is different and often times in portraiture the radius is left rather small, while in architecture or landscape, the radius can be made a bit larger to truly define the edges of your scene. With the radius slider the option key will create an overlay that allows you to see the effect of the edge sharpening in a visual and easy to understand way. The edges that are being effected become clearly defined and the areas of the photograph where this effect is not being applied will be left hidden behind a gray overlay. In the screen-capture above you’ll see with the radius slider maxed out the trees along the horizon are clearly defined in the overly. The Detail Slider I like to think of the detail slider as a fine-tuning slider or even just simply as picking up from where the radius slider left off. Rather than focusing on the hard edges of the image the detail slider is designed more for bringing out the finer textures of the images. It does this by controlling how the high frequency data is displayed. The further you push the detail slider to the right the more high frequency dat

Architectural sketches and motifs are etched across the concrete walls of the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin by Russian architecture collective SPEECH Tchoban/Kuznetsov. Architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov of SPEECH Tchoban/Kuznetsov designed the building to house the collections of the Tchoban Foundation, which the architect founded in 2009 as an archive of architectural drawings from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Located on the site of a former brewery, the five-storey museum will be the foundation's first address and comprises a stack of overlapping concrete volumes with a glass penthouse positioned on top. Architectural reliefs cover all three of the yellowish-grey concrete facades and form repetitive patterns. The surfaces are also broken up into groups of gently angled planes, intended to mimic overlapping sheets of paper. "This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the museum's architectural look," explain the architects. The ground floor of the building accommodates an entrance hall, shop and library. The collections will be housed on the three middle floors and will only be accessible by appointment, while the the glass penthouse and roof terrace will function as an events space. The Museum for Architectural Drawing is set to open in June and will present both a permanent drawing collection and loans from international collections. Architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov have worked together on various projects as SPEECH Tchoban/Kuznetsov, but also run their own separate studios. Their past collaborations include curating the Russian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. See more museums on Dezeen, including the new Design Museum for Barcelona. Photography is by Patricia Parinejad. Here's a project description from SPEECH Tchoban/Kuznetsov: Museum for architectural drawings of the S.Tchoban Foundation The Architectural Graphics Museum is meant for placing and exposing the collections of Sergey Choban's Fund founded in 2009 for the purpose of architectural graphics art popularisation as well as for interim exhibitions from different institutions including such famous as Sir John Soane's Museum in London or Art school in Paris. For the construction of the Museum, the Foundation purchased a small lot on the territory of the former factory complex Pfefferberg, where the art-cluster is formed. Here are already located the famous architecture gallery AEDES, modern art gallery and artists' workshops. The Architectural Graphics Museum that is being constructed will become a logical continuation to the development of the new cultural centre in a district Prenzlauer Berg that is very popular among Berlin residents. The new Museum building will flank the firewall of the adjacent four-storey residential house. Such neighborhood and the location under the conditions of the current development implied the irregular space-planning arrangement of the Museum. The volume that is compact in terms of design rises up to the mark of the neighboring roof ridge, forming five blocks clearly cut in the building carcass and offset in relation to each other. The upper block, made of glass, hang over the whole volume of the building in cantilever. The façades of the four lower blocks are made of concrete and its surfaces are covered with relief drawings with architectural motives, repeating on every level and overlapping each other as sheets of paper. This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the Museum's architectural look. On the first and third floors from the side of Christinenstrasse, the flat surfaces of the massive concrete walls are alternate with large glass paintings accentuating the main building entrance and recreation area in front of one of the graphic cabinets. On the first floor there will be the entrance hall – library. Two cabinets for drawings exposition and arc

Architects: MACLA Arquitectos Location: San Javier, Murcia, Spain Architect In Charge: Miguel Cabanes Ginés, Elena Robles Alonso & Pedro Gambín Hurtado Area: 929.0 sqm Year: 2008 Photographs: Diego Opazo Quantity Surveyor: José Luis Navarro Sanleón Exterior Area: 1418 m2 Engineer Direction: Andrés Ortuño Builder: Miala S,L. Budget: 901.072 euros Promoter: TARAY SAU The current offices of Taray SAU promoter, are placed in a triangular plot exempt. It is an isolated building which contained the offices of the promoter and we opted to maintain due to his perfect condition of conservation, attacking only the substitution of the exterior carpentry and the adequacy of the interiors appearance to the new face of the brand. It is a building developed in a basement, foreseen for a future extension of the office, and one floor above ground that shelters the different departments of the promoter. The Basement is a lit by “english court” with acute geometry. The building trace responds to the geometry of the Plot potente and orientation criteria to optimize the termal behavior of constructed. The extensión building is constructed as a “necklace” building around the existing building, so that both coexist without interfering in their scales. The old and new buildings are connected with glass walkways that provide high transparency between interior and exterior. The pieces of the necklace are the different parts of the program that are placed according to the needs of the inner workings of the company. We got to this strategy a courtyard, black gravel finish, visually linking the whole releasing important jobs outside traffic which favors an optimal environment to develop the work. The development of the plot also has undergone surgery. In order to enhance the building proposes a neutral ground plane finished with white gravel or grass as areas and only have remained some large trees existing in the original plot. The mantle of white gravel contains about circles distinct aromatic ground cover and provide splashes of color, which gives to the whole the degree of abstraction and visual compositional intend with our project. With all this, the building assumes the new face of the brand, a contemporary and cutting edge where visual criteria should go hand in hand to the constructive. The attention to detail is the maximum of Mies Van der Rohe constructive “less is more”. The exterior walls are of concrete blind and polished galvanized steel joinery, in sharp contrast with the whitewashed walls and woodworks of the existing buildingA draft of etched glass wall and backlit, with the logo of the company, which bears the access road advertising space mode. Taray Sau Office Building / MACLA Arquitectos originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 22 May 2013.send to Twitter | Share on Facebook | What do you think about this?

CHAPTER 6: THERE'S NOTHING MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN A PURPLE BEACH SMOTHERED IN MELTING TROMMETTES DURING A CRIMSON TINGED SUNSET ON THE FRENCH RIVERIA, HOLY SHIT I'M TRIPPING MY FUCKING FACE OFF.It's night. When the fuck did it become night? I'm naked. Where the fuck did my clothes go? I'm on the beach. Why the fuck did I leave the film market?I think this is the Plage de la Balterie, Cannes' infamous nude beach. Ok, at least I'm not calling attention to myself by being naked since it's supposed to be a nude beach.But it's also raining, so no one else is nude right now.I'm sprinting along the beach. I don't know why, but it feels great. I think I see Anne Hathaway taking a stroll... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Eat dessert first