Smarts & Crafts Update

We were very honored to be invited to speak last night at Chronicle Books as part of their new "5 Speakers 5 Minutes 5 Questions" series. The topic was about design and blogs and we had a blast talking about Smarts & Crafts. The real fun though was meeting the other AMAZING and INSPIRING presenters, David from BoingBoing, Joe from Typophile, Dave from Grain Edit, and Suzanne from the Chronicle Book's blog.

And the timing couldn't have been better. We've been thinking a lot about Smarts & Crafts and what we can and should be doing with it. We've been having lots of fun with the Thursday Photo Assignments, and This? or This?, and filling you in on what's going on in the Shoppe and what not, and now we're about to embark on a new, more personal experiment.

We were listening to a great segment the other day on To the Best of our Knowledge called "Reconsidering Crafts". One of the guests was sociologist Richard Sennett who spoke about his book The Craftsman. We really appreciated his definition of "craft" as "any job a person commits to executing to the best of their abilities" We couldn't agree more, and that is a very nice description of how we're trying to live our lives—constantly working at getting better at what we do, and exploring and trying out things we haven't done, and sharing our enthusiasms and experiments with anyone who will listen. So our plan is to be more diligent and open with our lifelong adventure of Learn, Make, Share.

For the majority of our adult lives we've moved about every two years. Well, it's been two years now since we moved into the tiny 500 square foot apartment above the Shoppe and we're getting restless. We're not moving, but we need to shake things up a bit. So for the forseeable future we'll be doing regular posts detailing our renovations. And these aren't just apartment re-dos, we'll also be posting about our "lifestyle renovations" as well. We'll be sharing DIY, craft, and design projects as we customize everything and anything in our home, we'll talk about our ongoing battle with clutter and our attempts to organize the crap out of our crap. We'll talk about our forays into urban homesteading (bees!!!), and post the "life hacks" we've been working on over the years to create a lifestyle that is creative, and productive, and above all, Fun.

The posts will be casual, fast, and loose. We're going to enjoy doing them, and we hope you'll get something out of them as well. First post will be up soon. It's about our bathroom. Yikes!