Good designers have a way of fashioning surprises from familiar materials. Here's three new projects--all of which elevate metal into something wonderfully strange--that made us sit up.

Tim Parson's zooms in on materials with a hyper-focused eye, whether it's metal, glass, ceramics, or even wicker. For these bowls, he figured out a way to drip molten pewter onto a mold, creating a piece that looks as if it's still runny. (Check out a video of the process here.)

This chair, by the Japanese masters at Nendo, doesn't look like metal at all. In fact, it was meant to make show-off wood. They took each piece of the chair and then hollowed it out and filled it with a steel frame. What results is a piece that emphasizes the wood itself--by making it appear vanishingly thin. (If you're hungry for more, there's a show of Nendo's recent work going up next week at the Museum of Art and Design in New York--the pieces range from chairs that look as if they're fading into the air to paper lamps whose shades are hand-blown, like glass.)

Brodie Neill often creates sinuous pieces using cutting-edge craft. He created the Reverb chair from a single sheet of nickle-plated aluminum. The sheet bends in on itself to create both the sittable area and the chair's structural support--kind of reminds you of a functional Jeff Koons.

[Via Spotd, Design Boom, and The Contemporist, each of which has more info and pics]