Hanji Happenings

For those of you living the UAE, there's going to be a Hanji exhibition on at the RAKSA Sailing Club on Tuesday, May 6th from 5 pm onwards. Would love to see as many of you as can make it so bring along your Hanji pieces to display.

In my next set of classes the students will be making an umbrella or, hold anything, stand.  In the past I've made them with traditional Korean paper designs and I really like the effect but I'm loving the colour yellow at the moment as it's so bright and cheerful  and it reminds me of Spring which is about to start here in the Northern hemisphere.  In fact we were invited to an Iranian New Year feast yesterday which traditionally falls around the 21st of March each year and the northward equinox. The celebration is called ' Nowruz' which means New Year and it marks the beginning of the Persian year.  Small yellow jonquils are displayed in Iranian homes as well as hyacinths in a variety  of different colours.   So with the colour yellow in mind I wanted to add a more contemporary look to the the stand so I found this wonderful cutout of a cat which I'm going to use around the sides and one of them may possibly find itself inside as well. ...

Here in the UAE we only have two seasons, summer in the mid to high 40s C & winter in the 20s C.  The change in temperatures between seasons is very welcome but due to the harsh summer conditions there isn't a huge variety of plants that will survive and therefore most of the fresh flowers are airflown in daily from Holland.  They are beautiful but it gets very expensive to be constantly buying fresh ones for display. I don't think about the other seasons so much these days but I did notice in one of the homeware stores this weekend that it was decorated ready for Spring.  There were special pastel toned bowls, flowery cushions,  blossoms of different varieties and  colourful plants as if to herald the beginning of a season we don't even experience in this part of the world.  They weren't fresh flowers they were artificial. I've never been much of a lover of plants other than fresh ones but these days they've improved tremendously from the old...