January 29, 2009 at 4:42 pm (Etsy, art, for sale)
My little Etsy shop has been featured on Shop Indie Online , you should go there and take a look around. Many Etsy artists are featured and there is some wonderful stuff to be seen, it truly is impressive, the amount of creativity that’s going around. They say the economy is making handmade stuff more popular. The economy is the ubiquitous bete noire these days, but hard times do tend to make people creative. Even in the worst of times, one’s life needn’t be bereft of art. If you don’t have the scratch to buy any indie art, at least look around and I’m sure you will be inspired to make something yourself. Art, after all, is not a luxury, it’s a necessary element that makes life more than just living.
On another note – I hate packing peanuts!
Just thought I’d mention that. As some of you know, while folding occupies much of my time, it does not pay the rent. To that end, I have a regular job in the acquisitions department of a college library. This fulfills another consuming interest of mine – books. I get to spend the day surrounded by books! I get to open boxes of new books every day! Wheeee!
Except every now and then, like today for instance, some of those books come packaged in boxes filled with aerated puffs of styrofoam evil commonly known as “packing peanuts”. In the course of shipping, they get jostled around a bit within the box, rubbing against the books and each other, building up a charge of static electricity until upon their release from their cardboard confines they have become the clingiest, stickingest, annoyingest substance known to humankind. In this dry, winter weather, the static cling is nigh irresistable. These bits of hellish fluff will levitate from the box and chase you around the room like the Furies pursuing Orestes. They stick to the books and work their way between the pages. They infest. Do not ship with packing peanuts!
I feel better now.
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January 19, 2009 at 4:28 pm (Etsy, for sale, origami)
I’m not a very good blogger. I’ll admit that. Of course looking at my posts and the interval of time between them should make that obvious.
I like to fold. I’ve been developing my own techniques towards that purpose for something like six years now and I still manage surprise myself with what I can find in a simple piece of paper. Origami tessellation is, after all, a niche within a niche and by all rights it should have exhausted itself by now. But I keep folding.
But I’m not that good at talking about what I do or how I do it. Folding the way I do has become as second nature as signing my own name. I don’t think about “reverse folds” and “rabbit ears” and “bird bases” when I fold and I don’t think any of those terms would apply anyway. I don’t know what words would apply.
So don’t count on a book of instructions or diagrams coming from me: it’s not that I’m trying to hide anything or that I am possessive of my designs. I just don’t know how to do that. I have great esteem for those who create and encourage others to create with them; artists who can teach. My friend Philip is a great example of this ideal. I wish I could do what he does.
People seem to like my origami, but I don’t think I’m much of an origamist. I’m just a struggling artist who stumbled onto an unusual way to get images out of my head and onto paper (or rather into paper). The creases I make are a meandering path into unknown territory, and the path is never the same the second time. If I could lead others down that path, or better yet, help them find their own, I would.
Speaking of meandering, all of this is merely poetical justification for the more prosaic purpose of shameless promotion. I don’t have instructions or diagrams but I do have the origami art itself. Once they are folded, I have no use for them, but hopefully someone else would. I try to make them look good, as I would with artwork of any other media, and each piece is one of a kind. I have opened a shop on Etsy to sell the fruits of my paper-folding perambulations. You can still go to my Flickr site, of course, if you just want to see what I’m up to. But now their is a home for pieces you can have for your very own. Buy one, hang it on your wall, scrutinize it, take it apart and try to put it back together again. Help me finance my paper habit.
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