Book review: Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found

The full title is Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found:  Unconventional Design from Castoffs. The book is a few years old now, but still good.

Authors Linda and John Meyers present a wide range of items for the home, made or remade, mostly using salvaged materials. (There were a couple of jobs that they sent out to professional fabricators.) Together they are "Wary Meyers". John formerly worked for Anthropologie designing window displays; I've been told these displays are extremely creative, but I've never seen any for myself.

Anyway I found this book wildly inspiring, as well as informative, although annoying at a couple of points.

I'll start with the elements that make this book one that I can highly recommend:

1.  Their examples of creatively using and re-using materials, from brand-new plexiglass and fabric all the way down to pool noodles and a piece of wood pried from an old sofa's weathered skeleton.

2.  The sketchbook drawings showing all the brainstorming that takes place before they choose an idea to pick up and carry through with.

Seriously, these are well worth seeing, but if you can't, you can easily do something similar yourself:  Take a sheet of plain paper, turn it sideways, and make a bunch of little sketches at first while you play with different ideas for a material (turn off the internal critic for a while); then make larger and more detailed sketches as you close in on what you actually like and want to build. Having the paper be wider horizontally than vertically does a lot more than you might think for broadening your thinking.

3.  At a couple of points, they give hints for knowing when to stop working on a project; how to avoid overworking it. For me, this usually isn't a problem, as my children ensure that I can barely get anything done, let alone overdone, but it is still good to know what to watch out for. Their examples were a chair, where they painted the seat but later regretted also painting the rusty legs, and a (faux) mantel made out of scrap wood, which they regretted painting white, liking the mix of wood tones better.

The points that were annoying to me mostly are a matter of envy on my part:  they were able to go all over the place (childfree), buying and scrounging all sorts of things, and then to spend hours and hours and hours putting them together in new, creative ways, and eventually they were even getting paid to do that and write about it. They have a great deal of design knowledge; there are allusions in the book that are going right over my head.