Great merino wool bobble hats by Alessia Giovanni in Italy. And a damn cute kid!

An interesting/odd project by atelier Alessio Blanco for Walt Disney Company:

Mickey Mouse was born as anthropomorphic mouse and from its origins until today has evolved to meet the aesthetic taste of a society in constant transformation. Continuing this process, now Mickey Mouse wants to complete his transformation into a man and then turns to plastic surgery.

If you go bananas over Alessi’s newest launch in its whimsical OrienTales collection of kitchen doodads that we adore, Banana Family, we wouldn’t be surprised. The collabo between the Italian company’s Stefano Giovannoni and Takeda Rumiko with the National Palace Museum Taiwan monkeys around with animated primates dressed in bright uniforms, hanging out and disguising themselves as spice holders (pictured), napkin rings and corkscrews. I love the parrot sitting atop the monkey’s head in the Banana Babies place markers—as if inviting pals over for dinner already isn’t fun enough. Design Boom has some better photos of the products, while the Alessi site shows them in 2-D; as you can see, they remarkably resemble the real thing.

A toothpick holder that becomes a spiny animal and salt and pepper shakers disguised as trees are just two of  the freshly released items in the second series of Alessi’s Orientales animated tableware collection. We first featured Giovannoni Stefano and Takeda Rumiko, the first of which we featured a few months ago. The aforementioned Forrest Gump set is probably the best of the new line, but a couple of the Sweet Fish castors would look great on any kitchen shelf too. I can’t wait to see what’s next so I can have an excuse to spend more time in the kitchen.

With its surreal moments, life can become quite cinematic at times, and depending on which side of the bed you wake up on and which happenstance you find yourself in as the day goes on, you could draw a parallel between your reality and an animated cartoon. Not that I experience a 2-D world often (well, not until I put my contact lenses in, anyway). But maybe it would actually be a lot more fun than you’d expected if you got to live in a cartoon sometimes, and this was an idea that became suddenly so appealing to me when I saw Alessi’s OrienTales collection (no permalink; click on “Spring/Summer 2008″). The Italian household goods company recruited design superman Stefano Giovannoni to combine heads with the National Palace Museum of Taiwan last year, and this playful set of goods is the new second series to come out of the coupling. Referencing Asian 18th-century ceramic containers, the products in the line are practical for the kitchen, from the Paradise Birds salt and pepper shakers to the Banana Boy sugar bowl, and each is partly hand-painted and made in bone china and bakelite. A book, Orientales: Eastern Stories Through Western Eyes, was released to delve into the details of this particular collection. If you didn’t look at them close enough, you could be convinced the OrienTales characters were taken straight out of a “Pukka” cartoon, all the more warranting of the need to make sure your 20/20 vision’s alright in the morning when you’re setting up breakfast.