Falling for books

Call us old-fashioned, but we really love books and the libraries that hold them. And after putting together this month's Designer Monthly, we know we are not the only ones! Come over to this month's DM dig deep into a host of articles about our bibliophilia, exploring all the wonderful ways that books inspire everything from jewelry to interior design. Check it out!

October Designer Monthly

Entertaining Baby

The mobile is so ubiquitous it's hard to imagine someone inventing it, and yet Alexander Calder is credited with coming up with the idea of having a moving sculpture hanging from a ceiling---and a generation of happy babies was born. The mobile transitioned quickly from being a creative moment of modernism to being a must-have over Baby's crib.

We like the simple cheeriness of these butterflies from Warm Biscuit

http://warmbiscuit.com/fligoffanmob.html

But if you want to try out your own artistic impulses, here's a kit ---you provide cards, or photos, or pictures you draw on cardstock, and clip them into  the mobile.http://www.weegallery.com/mobile.html

'Twas quilling: the art of Yulia Brodskaya

If you have never seen the work of renowned and revered Russian artist Yulia Brodskaya, you are surely missing out. Brodskaya, a native of Moscow who now resides in England, hand-crafts one of a kind art pieces from paper and glue.

Sound simple? Think again.

Brodskaya combines a talent for quilling - the decorative art of coiling, shaping and gluing paper  - with an unbounded imagination. Now a rising star in the design world, her work has appeared in numerous advertisements, installations, and magazine editorials around the world, and she was also tapped to create a custom theme for Google Chrome. Brodskaya posted a large version of the bird from that design (image below) in reponse to multiple queries from people who wanted the design for a tattoo. Talk about a permanent installation!

A sample of Yulia's work:

Click to read more ...

25th Anniversary Designer Monthly

The Sheffield School has been educating students in Interior Design now for 25 years.  More recently, we've added our Feng Shui Course and our Wedding and Event Planning Course.  And this march, we are officially kicking off the 25th Anniversary Celebration with a brand new edition of Designer Monthly.

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A Regular Bauhaus-Fest

If you saw my previous post on the Bauhaus exhibit at MOMA (or if you scroll down to it now) you'll see that MOMA has this terrific extravaganza of all things Bauhaus---paintings, sculpture, furniture, weaving, hands-on-workshops. Everything but a beer garden.

Not only that, but right uptown, at the Guggenheim Museum, there is a huge Kandinsky exhibit, showing the artist's work from his early, more representational paintings through his heyday as one of the Bauhaus instructors, and right on through his fascination with bimorphic imagery.

("Improvisation" by Vassily Kandinsky)

This exhibit is so exhilarating you have to be careful at the top not to fall over the edge with art-induced dizziness. It really completes the picture started at the MOMA exhibit---or the MOMA exhibit completes this picture.

Whichever, kudos to the Guggenheim and MOMA for holding these exhibits simultaneously. This is why I live in New York (and why you live here, or why you are going to come visit before the shows go---MOMA on January 25, Kandinsky on January 13).