High-concept bowls

One thing I find frustrating in the world of blogs are the design blogs that show you the cool one-offs that artists and industrial designers come up with that will never see the light of day...or I mean the light of "you can buy it somewhere" day. I usually avoid mentioning those interesting but unattainable things.

But...

...had to show these anyway. They come from a design duo from Vienna named Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler who make what they call "reversed volumes" by filling a bowl with a pigmented ceramic mixture and then pressing a fruit or vegetable into it. When the ceramic hardens, the fruit/vegetable is removed, leaving a "reversed volume."

Rabbit Hole Day

Today is Rabbit Hole Day, a day on which bloggers are meant to write about the strange new surroundings in which they have found themselves, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

So I have fallen into a place where everything is very, very small.

I couldn't resist showing you these microsculptures (top photo) by a British artist named Willard Wigan. I realize these having nothing to do with food, but you see I've fallen down a rabbit hole, and I found these amazing miniatures. The sculptures shown here are the six wives of Henry VIII. But wait, they are standing inside the eye of a needle. Check out the other miniatures at Willard Wigan: Micro Sculptor.

Now, staying with the same theme of impossibly tiny, but this time edging a little more toward food, the bottom photo is the sculpture of a very, very small orange. To appreciate its tininess, you should know that it is about one-third the width of your thumb.

There are nearly 3 dozen step-by-step photographs that show how to make it. The drawback is the extremely annoying website that the photographs are on. First you have to tell the website to ignore the ad that will automatically start playing when you go to the page. Then you'll have to scroll down until you get to the Tiny Man Made Orange how-tos. But it will be worth it.

Beautiful handmade papers....from food

Foods in cross-section can be quite beautiful (think of the starfruit, the kiwi or even an apple). Apparently a German art paper company thought the same thing and took ultra-thin slices of different fruits and vegetables to make what they call papyrus. Some of the more ordinary vegetables--like carrot and cucumber--were surprisingly neat looking. See if you can guess the fruits or vegetables in the photographs above (see below for answers).

If you're actually interested in purchasing any of these papers (they would be great for craft projects, especially anything where a light could shine through to show off the patterns...a lamp shade?), check them out at Hiromi Paper. They cost $9-14 per sheet.

Completely vegetarian beef steak

No meat here, this steak is actually made of paper. If you go to a site called Atelier Fare (it's a Japanese site, so don't expect to understand any of it), you'll find a section labeled (in English) "Papercraft of steak." There you can download a jpeg file of a raw sirloin steak.

The scale of the image is 1:1, so once you print the image, cut out the pieces and assemble them, you have a lifesize steak. How you assemble the steak is more or less self-explanatory, which is a good thing because the downloadable instruction manual is in Japanese.

If the raw steak gets your crafting/origami juices flowing, then you can also download some other projects to assemble, including a knife, fork, plate and cooked version of the steak.

Knitted key lime pie

I have noticed that, generally speaking, people who like to cook also like to craft. It makes perfect sense. In the case of cooking, however, your "craft project" usually doesn't have much of a shelf-life, especially if your audience comes back for seconds.

But here is a crafter who has found a way to give permanence to his culinary creations: Artist Ed Bing Lee knits his food. In addition to the Key Lime Pie you see here, Lee has a whole line of knitted foods in his "Delectables Series," including a hot dog and a cupcake with sprinkles.

Check out his Knotted Artworks website.

Crazy, crazy lunchboxes

If you haven't seen a book called Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes by Christopher Salyers, you have no idea what a really tricked-out lunchbox could look like. The art of arranging food artfully in a bento box (compartmented lunch box) is an age-old Japanese tradition. Now combine this with the current Japanese obsession with cartoon (manga) characters and you have something called charaben (a mash-up of the words bento and character).

You sort of have to see this yourself to understand what charaben is all about. There are sample pages of the book on the publisher's site. Check it out. Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes

There's something fishy here...

Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" made entirely of sushi. Hmmmmmm. This edible art was created by a Japanese sushi chef, Ken Kawasumi, to promote his new book called (ironically) The Simplest Way to Make Decorative Sushi Rolls.

The book is in Japanese, so even if you were tempted to use sushi to "paint" with, you'll have to wait until there is an American translation. Kawasumi has published two earlier books, though, that have been translated: Encyclopedia of Sushi Rolls and Sushi for Parties.

The ultimate refrigerator cookie

If you've ever made a checkerboard refrigerator cookie, you will appreciate the ingenuity of this idea from Eva Funderburgh, a Seattle-based artist. She used a Play-Doh Fun Factory to extrude strips of colored dough that she then assembled into a log, which when cut crosswise produced a cookie with an image on it. OK, this is next to impossible to describe. You'll have to check out the series of photographs that she posted on Flickr for her Pixel Cookies.

Fantastic foodscapes

Australia-based visual artist Carl Warner has done a series of what he calls "Foodscapes," which are photographs of what appear to be landscapes and house interiors, but are constructed entirely of food. The details are remarkable. To see Warner's Foodscapes, go to his website and click on the orange box to get to his collection of Fotographics. Then click on the 2nd portfolio, which is labeled (when you roll your cursor over it) Foodscapes.

My favorite shot is in the middle row on the far right. It's a kitchen scene in what is clearly the Italian countryside. The kitchen curtains are made of lasagna noodles. A big punchbowl is made from a tomato half with a macaroni ladle. The kitchen tablecloth looks to be made of a slice of cheese. Anyway, it's intriguing to see if you can identify all of the foods Warner has used to make these wonderful still-lifes. Check them out.

Vienna Vegetable Orchestra

Established in 1998, the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra is a group of 11 musicians (plus 1 sound technician and 1 video artist) who put on concerts using instruments made of vegetables. My favorite vegetable was the recorder made from a carrot and a trumpet-like instrument concocted from a cucumber, a bell pepper and a piece of carrot (see the photo at left).

Watch the video below that shows how the musicians create instruments from vegetables, and what one of their concerts is like. Apparently at the end of every concert, the audience is served a soup made of the parts of the vegetables that got carved out when the instruments were made.

Blendie

Kelly Dobson, an artist, invented a blender that responds to sounds. She took an old blender from the 1950s and retrofitted it so that you could turn the machine on and make it go various speeds depending on the tone and volume of your voice. This interactive blender is called Blendie.

According to the website (where you can see Blendie in action), "The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated."

You'll understand this better if you actually check Blendie out.