Thursday, March 13, 2008

My newest craft - japanese Washi


Since we live in Japan it is time to indulge a little into the local culture and to me that means the local crafts. I have a friend, Reika, who is half Okinawan and half Philippine. She taught some of us the traditional are of folding that beautiful origami paper into a Kimono design.
We added the little shoes (with string to make them the traditional shoes) and the fan. The wire behind the fan was taken from a typical Japanese greeting card (I have a few in my etsy store)... All the items were attached to a special almost square pretty decorated cardboard as a picture. From what I learned during the class this is a pretty traditional craft. I am still debating on how to frame the 3-D picture and who to give it as a gift to.

All together this was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to my next "cultural" craft class. I just signed up for 2 free classes on Camp Kinser for the end of the month. One is for decorating an egg with washi (Japanese paper) and the other one is for Japanese gift wrapping (that involves cloth, paper, string etc and looks always pretty elaborate to me). The egg decorating class made me think of beads (well, I can not hide it I am a beader at heart) and the idea of decorating some wooden beads with the washi is floating around in my brain. I will know more after the class....

2 comments:

capitolagirl said...

Those are beautiful, well done!

KORALLE said...

Thank you!!!!!