Retarded post, again

May 13, 2008 at 2:24 pm | Posted in All Finished Crafts, Craft - Books, Craft - How-to's | 3 Comments
Tags: book, Chinese knotting, craft book, 石畳編, magazine, paper, paper strips, recycled, tutorial, weaving

How my desk looks like always reflects how my life is going on. The picture on the left shows a small part of my desk roughly 10 days ago. It simply became worse and worse until I started packing up for the trip. My desk at home is empty right now, while I am creating another mess on the desk in the hotel room in a small old town north to Berlin. I am sure I will clean up before we leave….hopefully….:)

As I said, the picture is a little old, so does the craft project I wanted to show by the picture. It has been a problem for me that I constantly produce crafts faster than I manage to blog about them in the last few weeks. It is much easier for to stop blogging than to stop crafting, I guess. I am still have some slow progress with my craft project when I am away from home, but it is not so easy to get myself into a writing mood, namely making myself willing to type. Also, there is a little angel inside me reminding me of my thesis due next month all the time and she makes me feeling guilty about writing other than my thesis. At the end, I simply write nothing. 😛 On the other hand, when the lovely crafting ideas hit me, I can never resist. The “best” situation is sketching the quick flash in my pocket sketchbook and the worst would be I can help carrying it out. That usually happens when the materials are just available around.

When the idea is exciting enough or the the way of doing it is simple enough, I would choose to carry it out right away. This woven heart was the 2nd case: believe it or not, it was finished when I was cooking for dinner at the same time. The most time-consuming part would be preparing the strips, which I had a lot of leftovers from previous projects. The technique inside of the heart must have exist for a long time and I only notice it until I saw a little dog made using this different weaving way on the cover of a book published in Taiwan. I know nothing about the contents inside this book. I don’t know how much details are given. The dogs look sophisticated, but I figure maybe I can try it out by starting with small things. The motif on the dog looks somehow similar to a basic type (Cross knot十字结)of Chinese knots, so I tried to do the knotting with my strips and it worked! The first shape I thought about is a heart as squares/cubes would be too straightforward, maybe boring, to make and a heart is not too far away from a square. Except for a little trick on the corners, a heart can be as simple as 1 square+2 rectangles. Originally, I thought I would be making a coaster. It turns out to fit my little sketch book so well that I had to glue the heart onto it. Now, my sketchbook no longer looks like any other’s sketchbook. Isn’t it nice?

I cannot find the book I mentioned above in YesAsia. I don’t know about any other English sources to get Chinese book. As an alternative, you can search for Japanese books with keyword “石畳編“, which stands for the particular word for this technique, for example this book. I can see potential for more projects with this weaving method.