Seat Weaving for Fun and Profit

...hair from scratch, mastering seat weaving opens up a whole world of thrift store furniture rescue. I remember seeing a nice ladderback chair in a San Diego thrift store last year in great shape but in need of a new seat. Learn to weave your own seat and you could easily encircle your dining room table with a nice set of inexpensive, second-hand chairs. Seat weaving ain’t rocket science and it’s a whole lot more useful than sending idiots to mars....

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Asphaltum as a Wood Stain

...hat actually contain asphaltum were not to be found at my local art supply store. You can get asphaltum in the form of non-fibered roofing cement but, for some mysterious reason, I can only find fibered roofing cement Los Angeles and those fibers mean that it won’t work as a wood stain. But a light bulb went off last week when I realized that asphaltum can be wild harvested at one of Los Angeles’ oddest tourist attractions, the La Brea Tar Pits. I...

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What Kind of Wall Anchor Should I Use?

...ld screw. If the wall is hollow I can get a bigger drill bit and use either of the two wall anchors in this post. Remember to make sure you have the correct drill bit size for the wall anchor you’re using or you’ll have one of those multiple trips to the hardware store sort of day. Rodriguez’s article reminds me of a pledge I’ve made to myself of trying to understand the design and use of the fastener I need before venturing into the most confusin...

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Cartrivision: The Netflix of 1972

...tuff on blank tapes but if you wanted more recent films you had to go to a store, choose from a catalog, and then have the tapes mailed to the store for you to pick up. So, basically, it’s 1970s Netflix with no rewind. Unfortunately you’re all too late to get in on the Ebay auction since the beauty above sold for $1,525. If you’d like to get it working you’ve got to have some serious analog repair chops and any existing tapes will likely disintegr...

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A William Morris Pilgrimage

...loped Russia. In the U.K. and U.S. we got, instead, consumer culture. The revolution Morris worked towards never came to pass because, as Herbert Marcuse put it, If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is a attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance...

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