The best gift I received this year for Xmas was the ReadyMade book: How to Make {Almost} Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer. Thanks to my generous sister, I now hold the secrets to creating chandeliers from water bottles, recycling those annoying plastic cd covers into wall art, and making good modernist use of discarded shelves.
The Readymade book
We love everything about the ReadyMade book – the How-tos, the writing, the photographs and even the graphic design so perfectly merge witty ideas with serious DIY practicality. The book’s spine forms a straight-edge ruler (for measuring your projects!) and the cover is made from embossed recycled brown cardboard. The book is organized into six chapters, according to material: paper, plastic, wood, metal, glass and fabric. Each project is carefully explained in step-by-step format, with accompanying photographs and illustrations. Below are some examples of spreads from the book.
If you didn’t get the ReadyMade book for Xmas this year, and you want it – you are in luck, because its now on sale. (Ain’t those post-holiday sales great?) Make good use of those gift-certificates and pick it up from Amazon for $16.50
+ ReadyMade Book
+ ReadyMade Magazine
(Thanks to my awesome sister Katie for the best gift of the year!)
That looks like a brilliant book. I particularly like the CD cases reused for wall art; since I started transporting my CDs around in a couple of CaseLogic folders (they use a lot less space!), I’ve been wondering what to do with all the empties. And I’ve also been trying to work out a convenient way of mounting large images I’d made with The Rasterbator (http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/), just give it an image (it doesn’t have to be high-res) and tell it how many of what paper size and it’ll do the rest.
All I would have to do is mount all the CD cases together and then when the feeling takes me, I can just swap out all the pictures and put in something new! Genius :-)