Hanji Happenings

Work with my students is well underway for the construction of their Korean Hanji cabinet but an interesting event happened last night when one of them turned up for class with her cabinet sealed and ready to cut out the door. Here's a little bit of insight into a project like this: when constructing a piece of furniture out of cardboard its important to ensure that the design enables it to be sturdy enough to put things into, and place things on top of, the finished article. All surfaces needed to be cut out of a double thickness of cardboard, which were then glued together to give a total thickness of 6 mm.  This made working with it quite difficult at times as it was that much harder to cut out and it required  a lot more patience and muscle power to complete the job.  Once the job of cutting it out and putting it all together was done then the doors are to be cut out and later they will be refitted back into the cabinet. This process has taken a couple ...

My latest project is to design worksheets on how to construct this cabinet so that it's easy for my students to use.   I've found that writing down instructions are never as easy to simplify as you'd think but, they're so important to get right as poor instructions and therefore bad construction of an article can ruin a project. In my experience it seems that it doesn't matter how interesting the decoration is that I put on it, if the structure isn't right, it comes back to haunt me.  I made this cabinet in Korea about 12 years ago when I attended some classes with my Korean Hanji teacher and I was taught to cut the design out of cardboard, piece it together, paper and decorate it. It took in total around 3 months to make from start to finish, mainly because of the intricate details in the cutouts but, with the hands on guidance of my teacher it came together relatively easily.  Now I find myself revisiting those lessons so that I can pass on in...

Happy New Year everyone and may 2014 be a year of making more time for yourself and exploring your creativity !!  I 'm excited to be beginning a New Year that I know is going to be full of promise and  a year of challenges both on a personal and an artistic level. After over 13 years of studying and making Hanji craft pieces  in many different countries I'm looking forward to setting up my own Hanji art business operating here in the UAE, Australia, Korea and online.  Along with all this I've given myself the challenge of writing a book in English on Hanji arts and crafts, teaching Hanji classes as well as  continuing to develop my own creative style of the art.  Don't forget to keep checking out my  blog posts, along with browsing my website and Facebook page (please press 'like') to see what's happening in the world of Hanji in 2014.  If you know of any Hanji events, workshops or artists of interest and would like to shar...