Hasta La Ideas

Towels are garments too. Sure, they’re designed specifically to dry you down after a bath, but their absorbency aside, towels are meant to be worn, draped, wrapped around you. They’re made for skin contact, so an absorbent towel is just half the battle won… an absorbent AND luxuriously soft towel, however, ticks both the boxes.

Designer: Hono Bono

Click Here to Buy Now: $12 $20 (40% off). Hurry, for a limited time only!

There exist two schools of thought with towels (and we’ve covered them both). Some prefer a coarse towel that’s designed to exfoliate as it dries your skin, others prefer a towel that’s absorbent, but also as soft and gentle as your favorite comforter or fuzzy winter sweater. Designed to fit squarely into the latter school of thought, the YOKU towel feels like hugging a polar bear. Made from the softest and finest Suvin cotton (often referred to as White Gold), the towels are devotedly hand-crafted in Imabari, a Japanese town that’s perfected the art of towel-making.

With a history in towel-making spanning over 120 years, it’s safe to say that the craftspeople in Imabari know a thing or two about towel-making. Designed to be the equivalent of silk clothing, the Yoku towels wrap you in soft luxury. They’re so soft that they come recommended for babies too, and are designed to be extremely gentle on their delicate skin. The towels are meant for wiping, but they’re also meant for everything else. They act as comforters, are soft enough to be hugged, or even used as security blankets.

Yoku is hand-woven in Imabari – a small town off the north coast of Ehime, Japan. Imabari is well-known as the Mecca of towel production for over 120 years.

Only towels of the highest quality that meet stringent local standards can bear the tag of Imabari Towel.

Yoku comes with a tag of quality certification.

Yoku uses zero-twist pile technique that weaves in a special process using a loose yarn with fluffy fibers like a cotton bloom.

That doesn’t discount the Yoku’s abilities as a towel. The towels are made to be highly absorbent (thanks to a higher thread count), and dry as quickly too. The Suvin fibers are exceptionally soft and luxurious and are treated to be anti-microbial too. In fact, the towels even come certified by the Imabari Towel Industry Association, an organization that stringently checks the towels for absorbency, dye-quality, discoloration, tensile strength, formaldehyde, and even check to see if the towel shrinks when washed (hint – it doesn’t).

Yoku is weaved using 100% Suvin cotton, which is the reason that they are so huggable and everlasting.

Suvin surpasses common cotton varieties used to produce textiles.

Available in a variety of wonderfully muted colors, the Yoku towels come in 3 sizes – small towel, bath towel, and bath sheet – and ship along with a protective linen pouch and a set of instructions to help you take care of your Yoku… because it’s clearly much more than just an absorbent piece of cloth. It’s practically a skin-loving self-loving experience!

Click Here to Buy Now: $12 $20 (40% off). Hurry, for a limited time only!

The post The secret to designing better bath-towels lies in looking beyond just mere absorbency… first appeared on Yanko Design.

A rather adorable cross between a pet and a STEM toy, the Nybble is a small DIY robot feline that you can build and train to follow commands.

Named Nybble, the toy comes from the folks at Petoi (who even built a scaled-down consumer version of the Boston Dynamics dog). Nybble, however, has a body made from laser-cut MDF sheets and runs on its proprietary NyBoard processor, developed specifically for the robotic cat.

Nybble’s architecture makes it a rather nimble, flexible little cat, as it borrows directly from a cat’s skeleton and even builds on its canine predecessor, the Bittle’s design. The cat’s movement and behavior are pretty lifelike, brought about by the 11 servo motors that operate all its joints and the software that lets you make your Nybble sit, stretch, sleep, balance, say hi, and play dead. Try getting your regular cat to follow commands… I dare you.

Click Here to Buy Now: $209

The robot cat comes outfitted with two ultrasonic sensors on its front that act as the robot’s ‘eyes’. It sports a USB input that lets you connect it to a device to tinker around with its open-source code and teach it new tricks (in Scratch, Python, or C++), and even comes with Bluetooth and WiFi dongles as well as an infrared remote controller. Other parts include a holder for two 14500 Li-ion rechargeable 3.7V batteries that give Nybble up to 45 hours of play-time, and even silicone covers for the cat’s feet, to give it friction as well as prevent it from accidentally scratching your furniture.

Built as an exploratory toy, Nybble takes about 4 hours to build from scratch, although its body kit could easily be modified to give it a different character. The cat’s highly extensible with support for Raspberry Pi and Arduino ecosystems, and a whole slew of additional sensors (all available on Petoi’s website) to make your robot cat even more advanced. Just promise us you won’t make it sentient…

Designer: Petoi

Click Here to Buy Now: $209

The post You can buy yourself an open-source, trainable cat-version of the Boston Dynamics robot first appeared on Yanko Design.