Heather Jansch is a very talented artists who specializes in creating amazing sculptures of horses and other animals from driftwood.

As long as she can remember, Heather Jansch has always been fascinated by horses and dreamed of living in the middle of nature, surrounded by grazing horses. Thanks to her drawing and sculpting talents, she has fulfilled that dream and can truly say she does what she loves for a living, sculpting horses.

Her amazing driftwood horses are made from driftwood, gathered from estuaries and the local woodland, and oak provided by neighboring estates. Asked how she fits the pieces so well, Heather said “By whatever method works. Each sculpture is different and can sometimes call for innovative means of construction, it is part of the fascination and why my interest in this way of working continues.”

via bookofjoe

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Skull artists Quinn Gregory decided to take a break from designing bling-skulls and created a 5’3″ sculpture of Jesus, covered by nearly 250,000 Swarovski crystals.

Entitled “Infinite Hope” this statue of Jesus took the artist 14 and a half months to complete, 10 of which he pent just encrusting the crystals. To him “the brilliance  of the crystalized Jesus symbolizes all of the hope religion and my faith bring to me.”

He has entered his “Infinite Hope” in the Grand Rapids Michigan ART PRIZE contest, for a chance to win a considerable prize. $500,000 is awarded to the top 10 artists in the competition.

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The Holiday Inn Key Card Hotel was built by card-stacking master Bryan Berg, from 200,000 discarded hotel key cards.

To mark the relaunch of their hotel chain, numbering 1,200 establishments, Holiday Inn inaugurated the world’s first key card hotel, in Manhattan, New York. It’s made up of a guestroom, bathroom and lobby, featuring life size furniture made-out of key cards.

Bryan Berg, who built his first record-breaking house of cards when he was only 17, back in 1992, said this was his toughest challenge yet, because he has never created human scale structures before. The Key Card Hotel was opened on September 17 and will be in business until September 21. During the five day event, Bryan Berg will build a replica of the Empire State Building, inside the lobby of the strange hotel.

via Daily Mail and Xinhua

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Apart from the breathtaking Iguazu Falls, one of the most important tourist attractions in the Iguazu area is the House of Plastic Bottles, built out of plastic bottles and other recyclable materials.

Alfredo Alberto Santa Cruz got the idea of building a house from plastic bottles while he was creating a playhouse for his little daughter. After he finished it, he noticed the plastic the structure was pretty sturdy and realized he was on to something. That’s when he decided to build a one-bedroom cottage out of plastic bottles, for him and his family.

Mr. Santa Cruz’s bottle house features a bed, chairs, shelves and even a fake hanging plant, all made out of PET bottles. Practically everything inside the house is recyclable, apart from the wood framing and a few metal bolts. The walls are made from 2-liter plastic bottles, while the roof consists of hundreds of tetrapak cartons (the boxes you drink juice from). Alfredo has flattened them into shingles and turn them aluminum side up, to reflect the sun and keep the place cool. They would only last for 4-5 years, due to rains, but he covered them up with a layer of plastic, cut from bottles and says this combo could last even 20 years.

I’ve seen glass bottle houses before, even a temple built out of glass bottles, but this is my first plastic bottle house.

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Talented modder creates an awesome looking PC case, inspired by the pyramid ship featured in the movie Stargate.

I’m a big fan of case mods and we’ve had a few great custom PC cases featured on Oddity Central, but I think this is the coolest one yet. Modder Gup has created a PC case replica of the pyramid starship seen in Stargate, completely from scratch.

Apart from the incredible design of the case and the cool built in lights, the Pyramid Case features a moving side panel as well as a Stargate Active Desktop. All you have to do is input the chevrons and you’re on your way to a another planet.

The Pyramid PC features a T7200 Core 2 Duo processor, Mini-Itx Crommel LV-677 motherboard, 2GB of DDR2 Ram, a 160GB hard drive, and a Gforce 9400GT graphics card. Not the most impressive specs, but with a design like that, what’s inside doesn’t even matter that much.

For more photos and details on the building process of the Pyramid PC, check out this thread on the bit-tech forums.

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Stan Munro has spent the last six years of his life recreating some of the world’s most important landmarks out of nothing else but toothpicks.

Most people use them to get rid of food scraps from between their teeth, but 38-year-old Stan Munro, a former television host, uses them to create wooden works of art. Stan takes between one day and six months to glue together 1:164 scale models of some of the most impressive structures on Earth.

In order to create his amazing Toothpick City, Stan Munro has so far used six million toothpicks and 172 liters of glue, but his work is far from over. Right now he is working on a toothpick replica of Angkor Wat, the most complex structure he has ever had to build. All his models are on display at the Museum of Science and Technology, in Syracuse, New York.

Photos by SOLENT NEWS & PHOTO AGENCY

via Telegraph.co.uk

Here are some of his most incredible-looking toothpick creations:

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Seven Israeli designers worked on creating a set of beautiful wedding dresses, made out of toilet paper, in celebration of the most requested wedding date in the world, September 9, 2009.

The talented designers presented their creations in Tel Aviv, as part of an advertising campaign for a toilet paper company. The idea behind the project is toilet paper wedding dresses are perfect for emotional brides as they can use it to wipe their tears of happiness or excess make-up.

These are not the first paper dresses I’ve seen, but they are definitely the most beautiful and they will be auctioned off and the winnings donated to a local charity.

Photos by David Silverman/Getty Images Europe

via Zimbio

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Featuring custom painted flames, taillights, headlights and side-view mirrors, the Harley-Davidson Armchair is probably the manliest chair ever made.

Designed and built by the guys at First Impressions, the Harley-Davidson can make anyone feel like a hardcore biker, right in the comfort of their own home. When you kick out the chair’s footrest, the chair’s speakers reward you with a motorcycle engine sound that lasts about 10 seconds. Armchairs just don’t get cooler than this.

First Impressions has created custom home theaters for celebrities the likes of Don Johnson, Vanilla Ice or Michael Winslow. The home-theaters at Neverland and Graceland are also masterpieces of the above mentioned company.

The Harley-Davidson Armchair is priced at $6,950, but you can have your custom built First Impressions home-theater, starting at $150,000.

via Gizmodo

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Created by artist Jean Shin, Chance City is made-up of $32,404 worth of discarded “Scratch & Win” lottery tickets, displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

What can you do with thousands of apparently worthless losing lottery tickets? Not much, either recycle them or use them as building material. Jean Shin opted for the second choice and created a number of urban buildings she chose to call Chance City.

The structures of Chance City are sustained only by gravity and friction, yet some of them have been around since 2002, when the project started. Back then, the design contained $17,119 worth of lottery tickets, but it grew to $24,496 worth in 2004 and plans to expand even more.

Chance City is the embodiment of failed hopes of ordinary people, while its fragile-looking, yet resilient buildings “are symbols of the American Dream representing how labor, money and resilience defy the odds of a fragile existence”.

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Judging by the amount of trash we generate every day, it’s no wonder people are beginning to build structures using it.

100 tons of PET bottles, pressed into bales, were used to create the Temple of Trash, presented at the 2007 Follydock Festival, in Rotterdam. The idea behind this project by Salzig Design is future generations might actually end up believing human kind worships the trash it produces and dumps into landfills.

The Temple of Trash was a temporary installation, but, although it’s not standing anymore, it can still be admired on the official site of Salzig Design

via Treehugger

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These incredible artworks belong to Scott Wade, a man who once again proves anything can be a diamond in the rough, even a dirty car window.

Scott Wade is a talented is a talented graphic designer, from Wimberley, Texas, who loves to get his hands dirty. He paints all kinds of pictures in the back of his and his wife’s car, using only his fingers, dust and a few brushes. From the Mona Lisa to the portrait of Albert Einstein, Wade has created a series of artworks that have often stopped traffic.

He says people often gather around their cars when they go out, just to admire the beauty and detail of his art. Some get out of their vehicles at a red light and take pictures of his car.

Mr. Wade doesn’t drive his cars on a dirt track to get it dirty enough. Instead he uses oil, a special kind of dirt and a hair dryer to spread it across the windows. This takes him about 10 minutes, instead of seven days of driving through the dirt.

Working with dust means his masterpieces are destroyed whenever it rains, but Scott Wade views that as an opportunity to create even more impressive artworks. You have to admit it’s a lot more impressive than writing “wash me” on a car window.

Go to Scott Wade’s official site to check out more photos of his dirty art.

via Daily Mail

Rising proudly from the crop fields between Chester and Nantwich, Straw Ben is a straw replica of the famous Big-Ben, in London.

An ice-cream company from Britain thought of an original way to celebrate Big-Ben‘s 150th anniversary and came up with a very original idea. Using a steel frame and 500 bales of hay, they created a 70ft-tall replica of the famous clock-tower, almost a quarter the size of the real thing.

Nicknamed “Straw-Ben“, this straw masterpiece is surrounded by a fence and even has an alarm to discourage anyone who would try to climb it. Chris Sadler, the ice-cream company’s director, says these safety precautions were necessary, since the sculpture was very expensive.

This is just one of the straw works-of art created by this British ice-cream company and you can see some of their other creations in the photos below:

via Daily Mail

Things are often more than they appear to be, but the money wallet is a lot less.

Designed to look like a bunch of $100 bills in a rubber band, the Money Wallet looks awfully tempting to pickpockets, so it’s a good way to distract their attention and protect your savings.

With the number of home burials on the rise in the US, people have a wider range of coffins to choose from.

One of these options is the Bookcase Coffin, built by Chuck Lakin, a woodworker from Waterville, Maine. Mr Lakin makes all kinds of home burial coffins, that double as bookcases, coffee-tables or entertainment centers, until the moment they are needed.

I guess it’s a good way to save on furniture, but still, I couldn’t stand looking at my coffin every day, until I die. The Coffin Couch isn’t any better either.

via  Book of Joe

What looks like the world’s biggest videotape collection, is actually an artistic display presented at this year’s Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Entitled Life Span and displayed in a small church on Garibaldi Street, this giant block full of VHS videotapes is the work of Australian artists Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro. In numbers 195,774 tapes and features a total recording time of 66 years.

Life Span is a physical representation of what a human being can see from its birth, to the day it dies.

via Drugoi