Tiny Toys

Photo courtesy Flickr

I visited Japantown the other day, and the local grocery store had an interesting selection of toys, none of which was larger than a sugar pea. The world seems to have made room for collectible pencil erasers made to look like miniature fruits and vegetables. Not a bad teaching point for kids. The minimal size of the things makes it possible for a child to afford them and to be able to carry around a pocket collection.

Really small toys foster fine motor skills and, I think, protect a child from feeling small herself. These little playthings stood next to housewares, and a quick scan of the six-foot square pile of small appliances revealed just about everything a sane person would want to cook an ordinary meal.

Small-scale basic furnishings are excellent value. They make the best use of expensive space, save personal energy, require less tending than a pot on a stove, and use far electricity than standard appliances. I find them calming and elegant.

If I were to start housekeeping from zero, I would start with an automotive fire extinguisher and smoke alarm. Then I would go to an outdoor store, buying flyweight hiker’s basics, particularly a rectangular two-burner self-encased gas grill, portable wok and lid, a titanium tea pot, a sleeping bag that zips open flat, a luxurious self-inflating air mattress, and the utterly elegant LED tent lantern with translucent white silicone globe. My next stop would be a store like the one I visited the other day, because its offerings will make the most of the tiny space a newly fledged housekeeper might be able to afford.

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More after the jump.

Habitat

Photo courtesy Flickr

Dear Readers,

I’m sorry to have missed yesterday’s post. I hope what follows is worth the wait:

Yesterday I enjoyed an outing and ladies’ lunch with a couple of old friends. Among us we have eleven children. My friends have enjoyed the best the suburbs have to offer while I committed myself to city living at age four.

The day and the lunch were a study in urban restoration. We started at Habitat for Humanity’s retail store in the industrial area of Seattle, two of us arriving by bus. I showed up early and spent half a solitary hour in a wildlife sanctuary at the end of a street one block upriver from the warehouse. The park abuts a federal government parking lot, and it was good to have a security guard keep an eye on what I was doing. Cell phones make coordinating public transportation a simple matter. If a situation is inconvenient, I just call a cab. The one time I told the dispatcher I didn’t feel safe, the cab arrived in ninety seconds.

The store was a revelation, not so much for the materials and furniture it had to offer (Victorian antiques are good value again, although ten times the good value they were in the Sixties) as for the atmosphere. It’s a privilege to shop in a place staffed by healthy, righteous people doing the correct green thing. I didn’t buy anything but was happy find commercial-grade linoleum and tile and some Georgian brass chandeliers.

The fashion for granite counters evolved from Alan Buchsbaum’s reuse of salvaged office siding during New York’s construction boom in the Seventies. High-end canned retail marketing took all the fun out of improvising with sheets of stone, but Habitat’s salvage corner brings the technique back to life. A slab of stone turns a stable table into a level, fireproof work top that can be used for anything from cooking to graphics as long as one avoids toxins. Stone is also a reverse stove, good for cooling leftovers and confections.

Habitat’s parking lot adjoins a huge shipping facility, and while we waited for the store to open, the ultimate fork lift moved an empty container off a tall stack of those huge building blocks. I recalled the “Habitat” installation at the Toronto World’s Fair in the early Seventies. That Israeli project stacked up house trailers to make a high-rise and introduced the word habitat to daily speech. Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, well worth buying if you want to make the most of your space, lays out the subtle nuances of housing that make up a protective, comforting, and productive dwelling.

Lunch in the International District followed the scouting trip, and when we left the restaurant, I surprised one companion by telling her I had a couple of errands in the neighborhood and was planning to walk home afterwards. My pedestrian buddy added that the house was only a mile from the restaurant. Walking and driving offer radically different experiences of space. On a previous visit, I had spent half an hour looking for a parking place. It was only on the way home that I realized I had been hunting in my back yard.

Now and then intuition (see Bucky Fuller’s book of the same title) starts hollering that I should visit a particular store. If I follow my hunch, half the time I find something amazing that I didn’t know I needed. Down the street from the restaurant is an elegant, highly original Japanese store that sells a mixture of crafts, antiques, jewelry, clothing, and books. Just by looking around this place, one of two in adjoining neighborhoods, I learn enough to pay for the time and bus fare it takes to get there.

When I walked into the shop, which is located in a space formerly occupied by a venerable local Japanese dime store, I was overcome by the atmosphere. It had been a while since I visited a traditional Japanese merchant, and I immediately recalled Kenneth Hanson’s poetry about the neighborhood. In Seattle, Japan and China are the old countries.

Whoever controls the interiors in this shop and its sister a couple of miles away, sees empty space as the vital, resonant resource it is. The unknown designer used a few yards of what looked like handwoven indigo horse reins to define an area as strongly as an architect would use a wall. The unspeakable elegance and power of almost nothing puts old-fashioned consumerism to shame.

On offer were a couple of books about tiny interiors and tiny houses. I leafed through them, but decided that I now know enough about what to omit to be able to solo. It’s a long learning curve, though, learning to subtract. There were some red lacquer footed trays that would have been useful. In a hopeful moment, I picked one up but decided that at this point in my life, I don’t want to worry about protecting lacquer from cracking.

Next door was a new (to me) shop, also Japanese, with a quietly stunning window display of chic black clothing, a textile essay in texture and technology. I let the background toys and accessories lure me in, and was wonderfully surprised by the international mix of high fashion, skater, and pure down home fun. Yale University Press’s 2008 title about Goth fashion is good background for this style.

When I reached my original destination, I realized that the bus tunnel and transit center have contracted distance. The shops in the International District and downtown are literally a stone’s throw from air, rail, and highway connections to anywhere in the world. If the Internet isn’t enough.

The biggish store had moved to a new facility that combines living quarters, restaurants, book sales, groceries, and housewares. This was my first visit, and unlike the poised, traditional elegance of the former store, the new one presents a neon jam like the aisles in Blade Runner. It was wonderful. Bucky Fuller’s I Seem to Be A Verb is relevant.

I looked for bowls and was happily surprised to learn that Made in Japan tabletop is affordable again. A few years ago, a visit to the same place left me gasping. I found a good range of choices and ended up bringing home stacking vermilion plastic variants of traditional lacquer ware. I prefer to eat from ceramic or glass dishes, but plastic will do for dry snacks. My partner certainly had it right years ago when he commented that one of the reasons Japan dominated the market for consumer electronics was that plastic works up like lacquer.

We often carry a meal upstairs, and as I cruised the housewares, I realized that the Japanese genius for small space design had stocked the displays with featherlight dishes that take up minimal space on a tray. Any dish can stack, but it’s a neat trick to design one that stacks when it is full.

Linking all the perceptions of the day was an awareness of the carrying capacity of the environment, of relieving the carbon load on the planet, and especially, of the use of small space. We’ve been slowly tightening up our game since the Sixties. A few issues ago, The World of Interiors remarked on what an exciting privilege it is to live in an international central city neighborhood. After yesterday and fourteen years in the gym, I couldn’t agree more. More after the jump.

On the Spot

Photo courtesy Flickr

Close the circles of supply. Save time, money, carbon dioxide, and solid waste fees.

The PBS perennial, Alone in the Wilderness, is Dick Proenneke’s narrative of building a log cabin in the Alaska woods. I’ve watched it four or five times, and now and then something new strikes me. A few days ago, I saw Proenneke hew a mallet out of one of the logs he had on hand. Next, he fabricated a handle for the iron augur he had packed in, remarking that he hadn’t had to carry any extra weight.

My partner’s grandfather trained as a knife smith in Finland, and he left handfuls of unhafted blades, files, and chisels. I understand, now. The privilege of working with an efficient custom-fitted handle more than compensates for the bother of making one.

A little skill lets one move fast and light. When printing was new, it spread unusually quickly in Europe. The printers, who worked in side chapels in cathedrals, frequently angered the local bishop and had to leave town in the middle of the night with their gear on a mule. Rather than humping lead type from city to city (a local printing museum enlisted a high school football team to help with a move), they packed the punches that were used to make the molds for type metal and the wood blocks for printing the herbal pot boilers they used to get started again.

Woody Guthrie worked as a sign painter until he realized that a guitar was easier to carry around.

I made $5,000 with one ten cent pen point.

With a few grams of needle, thread, beeswax, and thimble, you can sew a custom garment or renew a favorite with a few strategic stitches. The same holds true for knitting.

All you need to turn out a first-rate meal is a sharp knife and a good pot. Just safeguard that Washita stone you fished out of a corner of the basement after your grandparents moved to the home.

An ordinary household has many resources for fabricating convenience items. The more you produce on the spot, the more time and money you’ll save-both in your personal household and in the greater earth household.

At a fabric store, you can find a quilter’s rolling knife and self-healing cutting mat. With them, you can turn old T-shirts into shop and cleaning wipers. Even if you don’t use them yourself, you can make your painter or handy-person very happy with a gift of small knit squares meant to be used once. A cubical cardboard box with a round hole cut into one side makes a decent dispenser. The mat and rolling knife quickly pay for themselves and make fabricating paper projects fast and simple.

All garden debris can be recycled on the spot. Loppers remove branches small enough to mulch with the mower (follow safety precautions and make sure the machine is made of steel). The duff left after mowing makes a first-rate mulch. Prune major branches with a reciprocating saw, lop smaller branches with long-handled pruners, and chop mid-sized branches against a stump with a sharp hatchet. We supply our barbeque from our own city lot. Gearing up for small scale logging is a bother, but it’s short work compared to the expense and time it takes to bundle branches and have the city haul them away. Home-grown organic apple branches are a luxury for grilling.

Add these practices one at a time to your household systems, and you’ll find that you have to shop less often. It doesn’t matter if it takes years to implement them all, but it’s good to know what’s possible. I certainly don’t sew whole garments by hand or knock out tool handles myself, but it’s fun to whack a fresh set of chopsticks off the apple tree on the rare occasions we eat with them, and equally fun to roast a chicken over the smoky twigs later on. More after the jump.

Incandescence

Photo courtesy danielsalo.com

That’s 6W up there, dear readers, and a few ounces. It’s built on a wreath armature suspended from three hooks. The green things are called zip ties. If you’re careful, with a small tool, you can hold back the internal latch on one and reuse it. Use nail clippers to modify the ties and round the sharp trimmed edges over an open flame.

My friendly local Righteous Value hardware store sells an Edison base light socket that has been modified to accept the smaller 6W bulb, which I think is sold for car headlights.

Early electrified halls were lighted with fifteen-watt bulbs, which must have contributed in later, over-illuminated decades to the sense of Victorian houses being dismal relics. Nineteenth century houses are meant to be a symphony of shadows inside and out. In the Fifties, two films laid out the dark and light sides of Victorian culture. Joseph Cotton’s Magnificent Ambersons shows a family in decay. Hayley Mills’ Pollyanna is altogether positive.
More after the jump.