Bottle cap gardening in Japan

In a new twist on recycling and upcycling, Merry Project, have launched the Merry Farming Kit, priced at JPY 158. The kit includes a tablet of compressed, dry soil designed to fit a standard plastic bottle cap, and seeds for planting up. Then all that's required is to plant up and add a little water and wait for your very own mini garden to spring up. Super fun!

Spotted on: Springwise

Natural Silhouettes

I've been really fascinated by the outlines and shapes that trees form against the sky recently. This winter-battered tree at Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire really appealed to me. It was a freezing day and the sky was cruel, the tree looked like it's resolve was about to break and I pitied it.

Just off Tottenham Court Road. Not much to say, it just appealed and reminded me of all the light effects I saw in Shanghai. Glad to see London is embracing architectural lighting.

Window art

Spot the difference? I don't know whether this window was bricked up due to the window tax a couple of hundred years ago, but I love what they've done!

Rainy morning bath in Bevin Court

Pretty architecture feature down Euston way

What is a horrendously dull civic building is made a little more magical by LEDs impregnated into the walls.

Swarms of Circles

When I was in Turin over the summer I discovered the incredible Museum of Everything in the Pinacoteca Agnelli. If you haven't come across it, the Museum is an amazing insight into the artistic world of the outsider and the self-taught artist, many of whom have Asperger's, autism, obsessive compulsive disorders, learning difficulties or live reclusive lives.

The exhibition felt very honest, unpretentious, often funny and insightful. I felt warm inside when I left after a good two hours browsing, like I'd discovered a secret gem I wanted to keep for myself.

One artist I was drawn to in particular was Hiroyuki Doi. In the words of The New York Times, Doi creates "Abstract drawings... products of trance like concentration, but their method is free-form and incremental. Each design is built up from countless small-to-tiny black ink circles drawn in dense, foam-like clusters, with the clusters coalescing into larger forms that suggest mountains, galactic clouds or fleshy mounds."

They say it better than I do, all I can say is that I spent maybe 20 minutes with my jaw hanging open, awed by the amount of work that had gone into such detailed, faultless pen drawings.