Enjoying new origami !

You surely already know about origami, these little piece of square papers folded to obtain flowers, animals, clothes, ... I've fold origami since I'm a child and always heard that the piece of paper must be perfecly squared. But I discovered last week it was wrong ! Actually you can fold diamond shaped or even round shaped papers... And I discovered that thanks to Keiko San who came to teach us how to realize these very special origami.

Keiko San masters several japanese traditional arts. For example the Nankin Sudare. She introduced it to customers of J-Hoppers few monthes ago. You can check that here on my blog (french only, sorry). I really wish you to enjoy one of the performance of Keiko San one day you will come to our guesthouse.

You can see above some of our production : the long wing paper crane (diamond shaped paper), the 'super deformed' paper crane (round shaped paper). And after non-square paper origami, we enjoyed the famous Tsunagitsuru. This is several paper cranes connected by the wings, the tail or the head as they are all made of only one piece of paper. For example the red and white couple you can see above was made from only one piece of two colors paper and are connected side by side by the wing. A beautifull symbol of unbreakable love...　You can enjoy other examples of Tsunagitsuru on this webpage (in Japanese). Some of them can gather up to 97 paper cranes from only one piece of paper !! Even if it's only 97 it'}s called "100 paper cranes" meaning they are so numerous. Keiko San is making one for the Hiroshima Science Center. She made 48 cranes so far and hope to finish the 97 ones for the end of the year ...

Even Tabipon realized some "personal" version of the paper crane ;-)

By the way, looking for websites to link here I found something wonderfull : the oldest origami book. It has been published in 1797 in Kyoto and described 49 kinds of tsunagitsuru. You can see it integrally here.