Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Origami in China


Origami in China
Originally uploaded by origami_madness
As many of you know (especially the o-list folks) I took a two-week trip to China with family and freinds during the latter half of December. I promised that any origami I saw would be captured, tagged, and released back into the wild, as it were... so here they are.

I observed these folded objects in a pagoda and a restaurant, respectively. I was unable to procure instructions, as nobody was around in either case; the one on the left seems to be made from a long strip of cloth, crimped into a spiral then gathered at the back. I saw several things like it, so there may be some sort of diagram out threse somewhere.

The yellow object on the left (which has, surely, seen better days!) was part of a Buddhist shrine, so I didn't get the chance to examine it very closely... but here's a picture, anyway. It's from the Wild Goose Pagoda in the city of Xi'an, if any of you want to look it up... you have to climb the pagoda, though. It's on the third or fourth level if I remember right. I assume it's multi-piece, and in fact it looks like it may well be a variation on the modular lotus presented in David Mitchell's "Chinese Origami".

Sadly, aside from these two fabulous examples, I didn't see anything other than the ubiquitous napkin-folding, and only one of those was something I hadn't seen before... but I don't eat out much, so that doesn't mean anything. I reverse-engineered it in about three minutes, so I should be able to fold another one and take pictures if anybody's interested.

On a different note, I realized that this is my 100th photo post on flickr... But I'm a cheapskate and don't want to buy a Pro account, so I am tenatively announcing that I am in the process of designing/obtaining a website for my origami, and hope to have at least an image archive up by the end of the month, and maybe a full-fledged website by March or April (that would be new year's resolution number one).

So, Happy New Year everybody! And may it be a good one. Catch you all later.