On the Back Porch of America

...h false reality show drama and treated subjects with respect. Four more episodes will come out later this year. http://vimeo.com/91655829 Small Medium Large also did a piece on Root Simple pal Doug Tiano. Doug’s been making a whole army of soft sculpture copies of himself. Watch if you dare as Doug reveals his own underbelly shadow! Small Medium Large has a bunch of other great videos on their website. Who needs Netflix?...

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Erik on WFAE’s Charlotte Talks

...ish We Had Acres Farm Dr. Dave Hamilton – co-owner, Wish We Had Acres Farm; Naturopathic Doctor, Carolinas Natural Health in Matthews Erik Knutzen – author, blogger and podcaster, The Urban Homestead, Making It: Radical Home Economics for a Post-Consumer World and Root Simple; co-founder, Los Angeles Bread Bakers The show will be available for streaming around noon EST here....

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Ikea Karlstad Couch Hack

...pf noted, I would have been better off just getting a sheet of plywood and making the arms from scratch, which is what I ended up doing. To make the new plywood arms I put the project in Sketchup to figure out the dimensions. I’m a big believer in Sketchup. It has helped plan a lot of projects and prevented waste. It took just a few minutes to figure out the arm dimensions. I don’t have a table saw, so I used my circular saw and some guides to cut...

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A ceramic oil lamp

...much, I made a little seashell oil lamp the very first project in our book Making It. As a child of the electric age it continuously amazes me that I can make light so easily with cooking oil. Also, in reproducing these lights, I feel a connection to history. I’ve no doubt that my ancestors gathered around fish oil lamps in the north and olive oil lamps in the south. To add to their charms, they aren’t based on petroleum–as paraffin tea candles ar...

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Will 3D Printing Save Us From Bad Garden Sculpture?

...s are plagued with bronze, smiling, hyper-realistic statuary. For me these things evoke a visceral uncanny valley horror response. Perhaps 3D printing is the answer. In 2012 artist Oliver Laric approached a museum in the UK and proposed scanning objects from their collection and making the files available for free. You can see those scans, which include Dante, Roman and medieval objects and a few 19th century British mayors here. You can also see...

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