Saturday, March 29, 2008

My latest craft project


A closer look


Both the army base and the navy base have craft centers, and I recently took a class in the Japanese art of oshie. The pictures above show the finished project that I made. The basic idea is to glue paper (or sometimes fabric) around small pattern pieces of a thicker material. (Our thick layer was made of cardboard and a thin sponge glued together.) After you cover all the pattern pieces, you have to assemble them and glue them together. And then you mount the image on a pre-painted background. The class was only two hours long, and the project for this month was quite complex. Fortunately there were only three of us in the class, and our Japanese teacher helped me a lot! I used a toothpick to put glue on the edges of the paper, if that gives you an idea of how tiny some of the pieces were! Our teacher does a different design each month, and next month's project is a girl in a kimono with cherry blossoms. I think I might sign up for that class too!