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Owner of Alleged ‘Spite House’ in London Allowed to Keep Her Paint Job
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From cactus to aloe, drought-resistant succulents come in an amazing variety of shapes and colors. This variety, and the fact that they’re easy to care for, make succulents the perfect plants for everything from a tiny planter on the counter to a lavish outdoor display—and all the creative displays featured below.
Megan Andersen-Read stuffed snail shells with cuttings of various small succulents that had begun to root, and then added just enough potting soil around those roots. She had enough shells that she was able to put some of these gardens around the house and more outside as accents for her larger garden.
It’s hard to throw out obsolete books, but it may be easier to turn them into something pretty, like a miniature garden. Instructables member loveisinmytummy found this project to be easier than it looks. You hollow out the pages and build the garden of your dreams in tiny form. The accessories are optional; use your imagination to create the literary world you want.
We expect fresh greenery on a Christmas wreath, but a wreath of live flourishing succulents is a lovely celebration of warm weather. Stephanie at Garden Therapy shows you step-by-step how to make your own succulent wreath, whether fully planted like the one shown here, or partially-covered. She also teaches you how to care for it, and how to refresh your wreath when the plants begin to show their age.
To freshen up a space that’s too small for a wreath, how about a simple succulent ball? Instructables member marcellahella will help you create a little garden ornament that can go anywhere, and even move around to take advantage of different light and temperature conditions.
There’s no reason why your backyard fence or garden wall shouldn’t have its own artwork. Vertical gardening goes in a picture frame to display outdoors in this living painting project from Instructables member algert555. Once you have your framed shadow box built and loaded with soil, the fun comes in artfully arranging different succulents to create your masterpiece.
Does your refrigerator get sunshine? If not, there must be some metal surface in your home that does. Instructables member AlexeyY4 offers a tutorial on putting living plants in wine corks that you can stick on a metal surface and move around as you see fit.
Isn’t this charming—a miniature living diorama in a teacup! Muhaiminah Faiz made this one and gives us all the steps to create it and the accessories at Instructables.
How many times have you seen a nice chair abandoned in the street because the seat was broken or missing? Instructables member DIYwithCaitlin rescued an old chair frame to make a lovely planter filled with succulents. If you have plants on the ground and hanging plants, this idea gives you an intermediate level to balance the visuals on your porch or in your garden. Succulents look great in a metal chair as well.
Succulents can survive well enough as to be wearable for your wedding or other special occasion. Susan McLeary at PassionflowerMade will make custom necklaces, crowns, bracelets, and more composed of living succulents. After you wear them, they can be transplanted to soil to serve as a cherished souvenir. And if you have a gentle hand and patience, you can make your own succulent rings and earrings with instructions from Succulents and Sunshine.
If the conditions are right, you can wear succulents for a long time. They can be small enough to fit into a jewelry-size terrarium and stay green for years, with proper care. Boobooplant sells them in tiny terrariums that you can wear as a necklace, keychain, or pendant.
Megan Andersen-Read knows you can display succulents in anything, if you keep your eye out for possibilities. Even pine cones! Read her tutorial on how to build a hanging succulent garden in pine cones at Creative Live. A year later, she says the plants in the pine cones are doing just fine. Andersen-Read has also placed succulent gardens in toys and even shoes!
Since succulents can be tucked into tiny spaces and they don’t need much water, they are the perfect plants to set into broken pottery. You’ll find instructions for building a broken pot succulent garden at MidwestLiving.
Bricks aren’t something you’d normally put on your dinner table, but as a planter for attractive succulents, they make a nice centerpiece, with or without candles. Arianna Thomopolous shows us how she carved holes in red bricks to make one for Mother’s Day. Those planters will last forever.
April 26, 2017 – 12:00pm
Today’s Big Question: Can one take an oath of office with anything other than a religious article?
11 Outrageous Ballpark Foods
Have you maxed out on Cracker Jacks and hot dogs at baseball games? Luckily, Major League ballpark food has gone way beyond the classic, all-American cuisine in recent years. Here are seven outrageous specialty dishes available to try.
Two hundred years ago, America was obsessed with crafting fake spices out of wood. Here’s why.
7 Expert-Approved Ways to Write a Better To-Do List
If you really want to make the most of your planning time, ditch the old-school bullet format. Here are seven expert-approved ways to write a better to-do list.
Public figures ranging from Donald Trump to Snooki have all turned to ghostwriters to help with writing their memoirs. But what exactly does ghostwriting a book for someone else entail? And how much does the “author” end up contributing? We tapped a handful of professional ghostwriters to find out.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have successfully grown the first-ever working 3D brain circuits in a petri dish. Writing in the journal Nature, they say the network of living cells will allow us to study how the human brain develops.
Scientists have been culturing brain cells in the lab for some time now. But previous projects have produced only flat sheets of cells and tissue, which can’t really come close to recreating the three-dimensional conditions inside our heads. The Stanford researchers were especially interested in the way brain cells in a developing fetus can join up together to create networks.
“We’ve never been able to recapitulate these human-brain developmental events in a dish before,” senior author Sergiu Pasca, MD said in a statement.
Studying real-life pregnant women and their fetuses can also be ethically and technically tricky, which means there’s still a lot about our journey into the world that we don’t know.
“[This] process happens in the second half of pregnancy, so viewing it live is challenging,” Pasca said.
The latest project builds on earlier work from Pasca and his colleagues. In 2015, they devised a way to encourage pluripotent stem cells to grow, not into flat sheets, but into dense little spheres that can connect in three dimensions. The researchers used these spheres to grow two types of neurons, each found in a different region of the brain. Once the cells were functional, the researchers gently introduced the two groups to one another and watched to see what would happen.
The results were extraordinary. Within three days, the two batches had begun reaching toward and networking with one another. Experiments on the new circuits showed that the still-growing cells were sending signals back and forth, strengthening connections between two areas of the brain. It was like watching a brain come into being.
“Our method of assembling and carefully characterizing neuronal circuits in a dish is opening up new windows through which we can view the normal development of the fetal human brain,” said Pasca. “More importantly, it will help us see how this goes awry in individual patients.”
April 26, 2017 – 10:15am
Earlier this month, TLC announced that it was reviving the show that put the network on the map: Trading Spaces. The home improvement show was a ratings juggernaut for the network from 2000 to 2008, netting 9 million viewers per episode at its peak.
It succeeded with a simple premise: Two couples would trade houses, each helping an interior designer redecorate a room in the swapped home. They had just 48 hours and a $1000 budget. Then, the new room would be revealed to the homeowners. Some jumped with joy, others cried loudly offscreen. Now, all that drama is set to return sometime in 2018. But before Ty Pennington (presumably) dusts off his toolbelt, here are 10 fast facts about the original series.
Trading Spaces shook up both TLC and reality television when it premiered on October 13, 2000. But its concept wasn’t all that revolutionary. It was actually borrowed from the BBC show Changing Rooms, which ran from 1996 through 2004. On Changing Rooms, two couples also swapped homes to complete a quick interior redesign. There was even a breakout carpenter. Ty Pennington’s UK equivalent was “Handy” Andy Kane, who went on to record a super cheesy cover of “If I Had a Hammer.”
Although she’s probably the person most associated with Trading Spaces, Paige Davis was not the show’s original host. Alex McLeod hosted the first 40 episodes and earned a Daytime Emmy for her work. But she quit the DIY series to pursue other projects, including Joe Millionaire.
Besides Davis and its stable of designers, Trading Spaces boasted two other personalities: the carpenters. The originals were Pennington and Amy Wynn Pastor, but the pair weren’t churning out all that woodwork themselves. There was actually a third unseen carpenter, Eddie Barnard. According to Salon, he handled some of the more intensive projects but was billed only as “prop master” in the credits. Pastor felt super guilty about taking credit for his work when she first joined the show. “Every single day at the end of the shoot, I’d say, ‘I’m sorry,’” she recalled.
Since Trading Spaces relied on genuine reactions (be they positive or otherwise), the crew took great pains to hide any clues that might tip off the contestants. Good Housekeeping reported that sheets were hung from the windows so no one could sneak a peek inside, and any paint splotches on clothing were covered with duct tape before a producer or crew member went over to the other house.
Although countless angry couples would probably dispute this, executive producer Denise Cramsey told SF Gate that their liability release forms included space to list “protected” areas. That obviously didn’t mean the entire room, but if you specified a door or piece of furniture, the designers allegedly wouldn’t touch it. If the form was blank, all your stuff was fair game.
At the height of its popularity, Trading Spaces got an average of 100 to 200 submissions daily. That meant the producers could afford to be a little choosy, but according to a former contestant, there were only three grounds for disqualification. The first was if the show’s tractor-trailer couldn’t pull up to the house or there wasn’t sufficient space outside for the carpentry. The second was if the owners refused to let the designers alter “many household items like the curtains, cabinets, flooring, or furniture.” The third was if it was more than a two-minute walk between the houses. The crew was constantly doing quick runs between the locations, so if your best friends lived the next neighborhood over, you weren’t getting onto the show.
Trading Spaces was popular fodder on the emerging message boards of the early internet. Fans would post about their favorite episodes or defend their preferred designers. They also created a drinking game that included rules to take a drink every time “Ty climbs into cabinetry” or “someone mentions Genevieve’s bare feet.”
There’s a whole YouTube category of Trading Spaces “fails” or “hate it reveals” and, unsurprisingly, the homeowners in those clips did not keep their new rooms. Some couldn’t even wait 24 hours. In 2003, The Washington Post reported that Elaine and Bernie Burke ripped the burlap curtain in their redesigned bedroom off the next morning, throwing it in their yard to protect flowers from frost. April Kilstrom and Leslie Hoover had a much harder time: They were the miserable recipients of Hildi Santo-Tomas’s infamous hay room. The designer completely covered the walls of their living room, a space they shared with a toddler and baby, with strands of straw. According to SF Gate, it took the partners and three other adults 17 hours just to strip all the glue.
After Trading Spaces ended in 2008, some designers (like Santo-Tomas) faded into relative obscurity. But a few stayed onscreen through new home decorating shows. Vern Yip appeared on HGTV’s Deserving Design and also served as a judge on the same network’s Design Star. Doug Wilson stayed on TLC as the host of Moving Up. Genevieve Gorder became a regular HGTV all-star, with credits including Dear Genevieve, Design Star, and Genevieve’s Renovation under her belt. She’s now a frequent contributor to The Rachael Ray Show.
Gorder also debuted a QVC bedding line back in 2010. It’s currently unavailable, but you can still find her rugs at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
April 26, 2017 – 10:00am