You never know where you’re going to come across a great design idea. I’m currently doing some research on coyotes, and to this end I’m reading Shreve Stockton’s lovely memoir, The Daily Coyote: A Story of Love, Survival, and Trust in the Wilds of Wyoming. The book is based on the Daily Coyote blog, which chronicles the author’s life with a coyote.

Stockton, a lifelong city girl, falls in love with Wyoming while riding cross-country, San Francisco to New York City, on her Vespa. After a few days in New York, she realizes she’s not a city girl anymore; she wants to live in Wyoming. She signs a one-year lease on a four-bedroom house in Ten Sleep, a town of three hundred people. She writes, feeds cows, substitute teaches, and falls in love with a cowboy named Mike. When her lease is up, she moves into a tiny, tin-roofed log cabin at the base of Mike’s property (he wants her to move into his house at the top of the hill, but she cherishes her freedom, and opts for the cabin instead).

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The cabin is a miniature disaster, but she spiffs it up by chinking the walls, nailing Styrofoam insulation to the ceiling, sewing curtains, and using branches for curtain rods. And here’s where our literary design tip comes in:

I bought three thick, full-length wool coats at a secondhand store for six dollars each, then cut them up into rectangles of fabric which I sewed together to make a gorgeous wool rug for the floor.

I couldn’t find a photo of the rug, but pictured above is the terrific little guy who inspired the book. You can buy a print of this photograph here.

from the category Design Lit: where design and literature collide