The cave paintings of Capivara, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northwest Brazil, have captivated archeologists for decades. Now they’re capturing the imaginations of local artisans who are reproducing the artwork on these handmade ceramic mugs.

Per the retailer, every detail in the reproductions are done with posterity and the environment in mind, “from brush to clay to the water collected from rainfall.”

More than 40 families of artisans are involved in creating these mugs, which are available for $45 each from VivaTerra.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

One smiley face equals faster drying time and less energy use. Plus, they’re really cute.  

Hand-felted, artisan-crafted, wool dryer balls might not sound exciting, but once you see your energy savings you’ll be wearing a grin as wide as the one on the left. A wool dryer ball works the same as a dryer sheet, in principle. It separates the clothes and promotes the circulation of warm, dry air. The main difference is that these are chemical and odor free. They’ll also shorten your drying time by up to 20-25% and give your laundry a nice fluff.

Balls are sold as a set of 4 for $34.95. From Greenfeet.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

With eye-popping geometry, these stools wowed at New York’s 2011 ICFF.

The Stingo Stool, from Salvadoran design company Marka Moderna, has the makings of a classic. The triangular stainless steel base is wrapped with recycled plastic cords. The result is a modern and bold geometric shape.

When stacked, the Stingo creates a brilliant mosaic, which reminds us a bit of Mayan worry dolls. Can you see the connection or is it just our imagination? Perhaps we just want to collect a few of our own, which will set us back a pretty penny. Each stool costs between $125-$180.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

These edgy hand-painted candles will save you energy and rock your mantle.

The story goes that interior designer Lisa Carrier made a candle for Cher using hand painted Italian lace, rhinestones, silver studs and Swarovski crystals. Cher loved it so much that she commissioned several for her closest friends, thus launching Carrier’s career as a much sought after chandler.

We heart candles because at this time of year, they are both practical and flattering. Flattering, because we always look better in candlelight than we do under the kindest glare of bulbs, and practical because as daylight decreases, our energy usage creeps up.

Carrier’s paraffin pillar candles are scented with gardenia, jasmine, juniper berries, pinecones, vanilla, amber and black incense. Lovely. They also make for perfect seasonal gifts: the skull for Halloween; the Star of David for Chanukah; a cross from Christmas. Available from the designer for $90.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

These limited edition, hand-crafted beauties are worth writing home about.

You won’t find Takumi Macinari’s wood pens and mechanical pencils at Staples or Office Depot. Care of IDEA International, they are available for your list-making and letter-writing pleasure for a limited time only. With the exception of the ink refill in the pen and lead in the pencil, these handmade writing instruments are crafted entirely from wood, a labor-intensive process that results in producing only 100 of them each month.

Unfortunately, due to the time and cost associated with producing pens and pencils using this old-world style, they’ve been discontinued. The (ball)point is, now’s the time to claim yours.

The story behind the pen is an interesting one. Designed by motor vehicle engineer, Hosei Suzuki, he wanted to showcase wood as an industrial tool as well as a crafts material. The result is streamlined, sexy and ink worthy.

$45

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

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AM/FM Radio is cool again thanks to the Retro/Modern Magno.

Designed by Singgih Kartono out of naturally harvested new growth wood, the Magno radio makes the AM/FM dial cool again. For those unwilling to go back to commercial, some good news: it’s also MP3 compatible.

The Magno is a light mix of retro and modern, and 100% artisan (each is handcrafted in an Indonesian farming village). Plus, for every tree that is used for producing a radio, a new one is planted. Included in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial, ‘Why Design Now’ in 2010, The Magno has won multiple awards, including the Good Design Award in Tokyo and Design for Asia (DFA) in Hong Kong.

We give it the Lustable Award for best radio.

Available through Areaware for $300.

Twig Terrariums is forcing us to consider our lives in miniature.

Michelle Inciarrano and Katy Maslow, two old friends, create itty bitty, mini moments in time. Mini moss terrariums, to be specific, and “other small worlds” stuffed into antique, vintage and apothecary jars, occasionally science glass and kitchenware, and other odd glass objects they come across.

Their Brooklyn-based company, Twig Terrariums, specializes in miniaturizing scenes, be it a walk through a pastoral highland or punk rockers tagging a Lower East Side tenement.

They “go mossing” and “terraring” on the weekend (Twig-speak for moss and glass hunting), and can create just about any city or landscape request thrown at them. A grandmother recently came the pair and asked them to immortalize her granddaughter in a terrarium doing her two favorite things: playing the violin and hula-hooping, at the same time.

Most of their other clientele are urbanites with nary a piece of grass to their name, craving, as Michelle puts it, “their own little green world.”

“Our terrarium’s give urban dwellers some much needed nature,” she adds, “and space without having to drive.”

Michelle and Katy work with a dozen varieties of moss, plants and succulents, all easy to maintain greenery. Under a powerful magnifying glass, they style each inch-tall figurine to look like their life-sized subjects in various states of rustication, hiking, mountain climbing, hula-hooping – even mugging.

“They want to see themselves in their little worlds,” Katy explains. If only to retrace what went wrong in Central Park that one fine morning.”

Twig Terrariums pride themselves on being a green company, using vintage glass and upcycling whenever possible or working with a local glassblower for custom projects. Katy and Michelle have a book coming out in 2012, which will contain a glossary of all the terms a DIY terrarist should know, a how-to, and photos.

“When we first started making terrariums, they took over our homes,” Michelle warns of the addictive hobby turned career. “Basically, we want everyone to bring our worlds into theirs.”

And why not? They’re lovelier than a snapshot and sustainable enough for the brownest thumbs among us.

Prices start around $25 and can go up into the hundreds.

A new trend of craftsmen communities is taking center stage worldwide.

Forget plastics, the future is in craftsmanship. The world over, former clock-watchers and desk jockeys are leaving their traditional 9-to-5 jobs to make functional, artisan quality pieces for the home. Even Popular Mechanics picked up on the trend and gave it a sexy spin by dubbing it a hidden underground of craftsmen communities.

I prefer to think of them as New Artisans, neo-traditionalists who dropped the commute and took up tools to pursue a more sustainable way of being. We reached out to five such artists – a couple of engineers, a magazine editor and former academic among them – and discovered that they are not so much a part of an underground phenomena as they are heralding a new trend.

Here’s our prediction: as clients seek out more local – and thus green – craftsmen and women, the future of the New Artisan is a burgeoning one. With the exception of Hendzel + Hunt who are crafting it up across the pond in the UK, all of the artisans featured here are from the U.S. which is particularly good news: we’re actually starting to make things again.

Quentin Kelley of Infusion Furniture

“I could never sit in front of a computer all day long.”

“Coming out of school, I was really interested in international development work and that was my career path at the time. But woodworking had always been in the back of my mind. The work is always challenging and never boring because I wear many hats: designer, builder, mechanic, marketer. And it just blows my mind that you can take a pile of lumber and turn it into a beautiful piece of furniture.”

Alyssa Ettinger of Alyssa Ettinger Design

“I like plain, white things. Modern Country.”

“I’d been a magazine editor for many years, and I lost my last magazine job in 2002. I looked and looked for new positions, but couldn’t find any. In the meantime, I joined a friend at her ceramics class, something I’d not done since college. Once I was back at the wheel, I was hooked. Mostly, I take items I like in real life and find a way to translate them into porcelain.”

Donna Brady of Re-Surface

Are you a new artisan? “Yes, I likely fit the bill.”

Based in Brooklyn NY, Donna Brady opened RE-SURFACE, a boutique factory and design studio, when so many other businesses were shutting down. “My impetus for leaving the 9-5 world was the change in the economic landscape after 9-11.” Until then, Brady, who studied architecture at Columbia, was working as a freelance graphic artist and web designer. “Freelance work almost completely dried up for me.” So she opened up shop and now produces hand-crafted lighting and interior décor objects with “Art at heart, and design in mind.”

Jan Hendzel of Hendzel + Hunt Studio

“I have always been into creating objects.”

“There is nothing more satisfying than making your ideas become reality. And then seeing the reactions of people engaging with our products, it is a very rewarding process. A little quote by Thomas Edison: ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration.’”

Sean Schieber of Myrtle Grove

“I entered my late 20′s still unsure of what career path I would take. In my mind I knew I was biding time in corporate America.”

“I have an undergraduate degree from Hampshire College and a Masters in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where I studied Classics. My head was in books, especially poetry books. I enjoy designing and building furniture for some of the same reasons I enjoy writing. There is an ongoing process of refinement, of seeking the most sculptural line to construct a coherent whole. It is at once meditative and active, requiring attentiveness to the smallest details.”

Image: AntwerpenR

Shawn Lovell crafts and welds each leaf and tendril on The Tree Bed by hand.

Sleeping is for the birds. Seriously. And we think that’s a very cool thing, particularly if it’s done under this imaginative bird’s nest set atop a canopy of metal-worked trees. Fired up and welded by hand, the Tree Bed retails for $15,000, which is reasonable given all of the love that goes into crafting each leaf and tendril.

Shawn Lovell, the strong arm behind the tree bed, set up her Oakland, California shop in 1996 and specializes in one-of-a-kind residential and commercial projects using traditional and modern forging techniques.

Take a gander at Shawn Lovell’s process. Perhaps the only thing we love more than the look of this bed is a creative force of nature with an anvil.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

Is taxidermy too macabre for home decor?

Taxidermy, a Greek word meaning skin arranging, is something one might associate with cat obsessives or hunter-types that rely on hoofs and antlers to mount their egos. The collection of artistic taxidermy meanwhile, which was traditionally a rather Victorian pursuit, has given the practice a new pelt of cool thanks to antiquarians with a new vintage aesthetic and Lower East Side kids with a flair for the macabre.

My first run-in with a stuffed rodent happened in the West Hollywood apartment of a friend of mine whom I’ve long considered a style clarion. She’s an eco-conscious vegetarian and animal rights activist, to boot, who stopped buying leather shoes back in the early 90′s. That got me thinking: perhaps taxidermy should be considered from an eco point of view.

I reached out to Connie Reeves, an artist, florist and taxidermist in the UK who refers to herself as a Road-kill Romantic on her Twitter profile, for some insight.

“You could call it a form of upcycling, sure. Reanimating old objects and giving them a new life,” she explains. Connie is one who considers trophy taxidermy, “something that’s done to prove ownership over an animal,” a bit on the grotesque and weird side. Like the artist Polly Morgan, who works exclusively with animals that died a natural or unpreventable death, Connie also crafts her subjects from road kill remains and donated pets. She has a whole freezer full of them. “Twenty or thirty,” at last count including a Sparrowhawk that’s been in there for over three years.

“I’m just going to keep him until I’m ready.” The hawk was given to her by a friend who was very close to the bird, thus giving him flight anew must be approached delicately.

Thawing now is Connie’s next project: a baby mobile featuring a deceased seagull she was given by some friends. “Birds are my main subject that I come back to again and again,” she says. “I’m so enchanted by them and their freedom.” Her partridge Eugene (pictured below), is a personal favorite. “He and I go back a long way. He was saved by the gentleman who taught me how to taxidermy.”

Decorating with taxidermy – using a bird here and a rabbit there – goes completely against the look at the moment. It’s the anti-minimalist, using a mish-mash of patterns and objects to undecorate and celebrating a potpourri of objects as discrete and unique talking points. Taking us back to, sustainable chic or completely eek? It’s certainly reused…definitely recycled. Whether you love it or are completely repulsed by the idea of using taxidermy as décor, it’s a topic that is sure to liven up any dinner party conversation. Just wait until after the main course to show off your latest piece.

Images: James Coughlin for Diamond Tooth Taxidermy and Connie Reeves