Thursday, April 12, 2007

Too Much Information

I hope ya'll had a good Easter. It was a great weekend, here. (Yes, I realize it is now the middle of the week but I have last weekend stuff to talk about.)

Saturday we colored some eggs.

I got frustrated with the stupid little paint brush and decided to take matters into my own hands. (Sometimes it's just more fun if you make a big mess.)

I had some time to knit on the baby blanket. It is going to be so soft and wonderful - I am going to want to keep it for myself!


I am knitting it in strips about 4.5" wide and then I will just have to sew up the strips. I am contemplating doing a three needle bind off to seam the strips but that is a lot of picking up stitches. I want the seams to be as invisible as possible from the front side. Any thoughts?


I'm working on the fifth block of the first row of blocks (the black one in the middle) and it is going pretty quickly - I haven't had much time for working on it. I was knitting on it at the doctor's office on Monday and a very nice lady came and sat down beside me and started talking to me about knitting. It was a lovely conversation - we talked about the best way to secure the ends at the color changes. I considered this a good omen prior to seeing Dr. Doctor. I will show you a picture when I finish this first strip....which will hopefully be this weekend.


I hope I don't bore anyone to tears with this next part: More than you probably ever cared to know about origami.

In non-knitting crafty goings on, I mentioned on Friday that I was working on some origami. My origami-ing has been on a steady decline ever since I learned to knit. I still buy origami paper when I come across something that really stands out and on a skein to package-of-paper basis, I probably have as much paper stash as I do yarn. (Origami paper is much easier to hide, or rather store.)


Origami uses only a few different folds but the art of paper folding comes, of course, in the way the folds are combined. As a general rule, origami is created using square pieces of paper which are folded any number of ways but without cutting, tearing or otherwise altering the square pieces of paper. There exists a similar but separate discipline, called Kirogami, where cuts are used to create the finished piece.


Over the years, I have folded my fair share of paper cranes and dogs and cats and dragons and complicated birds and flowers but the vast majority of origami I do is modular origami. I have many books on origami and all but one of them are on modular origami. Traditional origami uses one piece of paper (sizes vary widely) to create one form - bird, boat, person, spider, whatever.

Modular origami appeals to the technical, analytical part of my brain that gets very little exercise from paper cranes. (Similarly, it is this part of my brain that is never going to let me rest until I knit a moebius scarf.)

Modular origami uses many pieces, folded into identically modules that are then fitted together to form geometric shapes. (In rare circumstances, a form will employee perhaps two or three different modules but at that point, it really veers off into the (very loosely defined) realm of multi-piece origami and mathematical origami.) But I digress . . . . In its purest form, modular origami designs interlock and do not use any glue, tape, thread or other adhesives to hold the modules together.


What I did on Friday night was this.
One module (folded from metallic paper, 6" square)30 modules
The prescribed number of modules (in this case, 30) are then creased and prepared to suit the intended final design.

Then the modules are interlocked to create a form.

A form that I had some difficulty photographing.

And there you have it. For the one or two of you who are still awake, here's today's quote.

Today's Quote:

"To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all." -Helen Rowland

7 comments:

MLFTC said...

I wanted to leave a comment so I will leave the following:

No comment.

:P

RobynR said...

How beautiful! I have deep respect and admiration for people who can make paper do such lovely things. I received an "Origami a day" calendar from my MIL a couple of years ago for Christmas and I think I only made it through to February before I completely lost patience with it.

*tangent* I'm highly amused by my word verification today "zuzxzm"

RC said...

WOW, so COOL! I may have to look into that... this could go bad quickly.
Really neat!
and I can't wait to see the blanket!

Jessica said...

How cool ... I am impressed. I wouldn't even know where to start folding paper to create such cool shapes. What do you do with your completed pieces? Do you display them on a special shelf, give them away as gifts ... ? Thanks for sharing your other crafts with us! It is so fun to see what different things people do outside the realm of yarn ...

Dr. B. said...

Wow! In addition to being amazing, that piece is also looks very large! So cool. And I bet it's extremely soothing to do.

Kristy said...

It isn't terribly big. This one only has thirty 6" square papers. I've done this model with as many was 66 papers. The one in the picture is about 6" tall/wide/deep.

Dorothy said...

I like it!