Recently, I had fun spending a day with my 2-year-old niece, Lola. At first, a day with a toddler seemed daunting. I tried to remember what I did with my children when they were that age. It started to come back pretty quickly, the need to occupy their young hands and minds with tactile things. […]
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Some years ago, on a visit to Istanbul, I wandered into a little guesthouse tucked into a street just down the hill from Topkapi Palace. The owner, Hikmet, was a master marbling artist, and the place reflected his passion for the art form. Everything in sight was marbled in bright colors and myriad patterns: lampshades, […]
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For three years I lived in a house with an outdoor composter. Then my family moved to an apartment in San Francisco where there was neither composter nor green box pickup! What was I going to do with all my kitchen scraps? I didn’t have the heart to put them in the landfill garbage or […]
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Though we can’t go into all the technical rules of ikebana here, (and I don’t adhere to them myself), I do want to inspire you to look at flowers with a discerning eye, to find unusual lines in an arrangement, and to develop a sense of poetic importance. It is the beauty of a moment, […]
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Imagine a world with no colored fabric. Look in your closet, at your furniture, at your towels and your curtains. Imagine everyone dressed only in white. Such a drab existence does not suit human beings. Long before Rit came in packets, color was everywhere. Beautiful colors were produced from plants, wood scraps, mud, shellfish, and […]
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My previous tutorial shows how to construct a simple sheet metal “bridge,” which, in combination with an ice cube bucket and an olive jar, makes an effective pneumatic trough for collecting gas samples over water. This tutorial shows how to use this apparatus to generate and collect pure oxygen, and how to use that oxygen […]
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Although it sounds like some kind of euphemism from Brave New World, a “pneumatic trough” is actually a very handy piece of classic chemistry lab kit. Besides providing a convenient means to collect samples of pure gases for various experiments, a pneumatic trough with a graduated container allows the easy volumetric measurement of reaction yields […]
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