Monday, June 11, 2007

Wedding Origami

No, there were no homicides on the honeymoon--we've just been a bit busy/out of touch. Chris is busy moving into our new apartment, and I started my summer job in Cooperstown immediately after our honeymoon. Since I don't have Internet access at my housing (or cell reception for that matter) I am out of touch as far as blogging goes. Now that I have battled the fancy new technology of an mp3 player, and come to some sort of truce, I can spend part of my once a week computer time on updating the blog. I loaded a bunch of pictures onto my computer a few days before the wedding, so the summer's posts from me are likely to be in the past tense.

Chris is still planning to post wedding photos, or a link to them, here on the blog when he gets a chance.

One of my contributions to the wedding was origami. I learned origami from my Dad as a kid. He did stuff like take apart the paper airplanes his students threw at him to figure out how they were folded. He also taught me the "water bomb" which he may have learned the same way. At some point my Aunt Stephanie gave me an origami book for Christmas. I loved it, but was too young to understand the directions, so when I wanted to fold something from it, Dad would follow the directions and fold it first, then teach me. I would fold it a few times to memorize it, since I could not yet read origami directions.

The wedding origami began with flowers. At least one of these is in the original origami book. I've collected a few more books and most of a calendar since then.


At this point I got concerned that the bouquet didn't look like much, and would just look like we cheaped-out on flowers. I also started to remember that flower arranging is not necessarily one of my skills. All that concern, however, was unfounded. I split these into two groups, my bouquet and my maid of dishonor's bouquet, and then began to spread them out and intersperse them with "leaves" cut from banana leaf paper.
As it turned out, less is more, which I should have realized when it comes to anything Japanese. I mean, that is their aesthetic, right? A week before the wedding, I remembered that the guys usually have boutonnieres, and a few days after that some memory of Mother's having corsages started poking in around the corners of my brain. By then I had help folding from Lisa, who was a great maid of dishonor who can pinch hit on stuff like origami flowers. She and Aaron and Derrick are all really good at tying up candied almonds in net squares, too.

Also seen at the wedding were this warren of rabbits, standing in for table favors:



See that little brown guy in the lower right? He had quite the adventure that night. I think the bright green guy on the left ended up a little sloshed too. They were on each table to declare that we decided a donation to the House Rabbit Society was way better than table favors. Rusty agreed.

5 comments:

Smarty Mags said...

Hurry up with the wedding pics, already! The origami flowers are beeutiful. And rabbit donations--such a great idea, and so much better than table chotzkys. Hope your summer is great.

Anonymous said...

Man, oh man! I'm missing you so much!

David said...

I really enjoyed reading your post about the wedding origami. I recently made some origami for my cousin's wedding, so I understand the feeling. Great art huh? I'm usually not the grammar police, but the term is "Maid of Honor." I'm pretty sure you love her enough that you wouldn't mean dishonor.

Fernanda Gomez said...

The flowers are so beautiful, I just can't believe is paper!

Wenni Donna said...

It is so beautiful! I am helping my best friend with her wedding and I have just finalized one of the Los Angeles venues for her wedding ceremony. I am so glad I came across this post. I can actually use these ideas for decorating the place.