austrian produce forever.

these austrian designers mischer'traxler immortalized their farmer's market purchases as the molds for ceramic bowls.

have you ever been to an austrian farmer's market?  well, i have.  i can tell you that wanting to worship austrian produce is a reasonable thing to do, because it's all just so damn gorgeous.

on their website they have a photo of a strawberry included with all their produce before it was molded into their bowls.  you'll notice there's no strawberry bowl in the photo above.  i hate to think what happened there.

really big embroidery! gorgeous!

via my love for you is a stampede of horses.

colonization.

a street artist named yaron decided to turn bus shelters in the czech republic into new neighborhoods.  did you see how he used the illumination from an advertisement to light up his little homes?  smart, smart man.

too bad there's no info on this man out there on the interwebs.

thanks for the photos, wooster collective!

treasures from the deep

i am not a jewelry girl. but don't these rings look spectacularly oceany?  they look like something mermaids would fight over. 

nektar destagni made these beauts out of bone and sand and silver and other sparkly things.  you can see her other things here.

paintings from my past for you.

all these little paintings are shiny because there's a layer of caulking between layers of paint.  it's messier (i.e., funner) this way.

paper cups can have double lives.

you think that's just a regular ol' cup of overpriced burnt-tasting sugary coffee, right?

but NO! it has a secret for you!  look inside!

oh Shannon, I'll never look at Starbucks cups the same.  thanks!

see more of her cuteness here.

umm... we're being watched.

thanks, wooster collective.  from somewhere in toronto.

SEED-TASTIC.

I give you the SEED CATHEDRAL!

This giant (66 feet tall!) structure is sitting over in China for Shanghai's World Expo opening in May. China apparently just likes to make things big (see: Great Wall, Giant Salamander, Giant Panda, Yangtze Dam). it has 60,000 25-foot-long fiber optic rods protruding from the center, and each rod is encapsulating a cluster of seeds from the Kew Gardens' (swoon!) Millennium Seed Bank.

The artist, Thomas Heatherwick, has plans to distribute the rods and their seeds all over, like dandelion seeds, to schools for study after the Expo has finished. Chinese folks have started to nickname the thing 'the dandelion'.

It gets better - Mr. Heatherwick's press release says each rod will be illuminated at night. CAN YOU THINK OF ANYTHING BETTER THAN A GIANT GLOWING BALL OF SEEDS?! no, me either.