We just published a 17-month academic year calendar full of beautiful images of origami artwork from my book, “Origami Tessellations: Awe-Inspiring Geometric Designs“. Available now for ordering – it’s being printed on-demand by HP’s MagCloud, which prints out some extremely nice product. Speaking of items on the calendar: The 2009 Origami USA convention is coming very soon, the last weekend in June in NYC. I will be attending (of course!) and exhibiting some new pieces. I hope to see you there! I will also be attending the 2009 Japanese Origami Academic Society (JOAS) convention in Tokyo this August 14-16 as one of their invited guests. Needless to say I am quite excited about this – my first trip as one of the special guests at an origami convention. I’m honored that the kind folks at JOAS asked me to attend, and I plan on bringing some special works that I’ve been getting ready especially for this trip! It’s going to be a busy summer – time to get a calendar to keep track of all …

I’m writing today to ask for your advice. Over the last five years, I have come quite far – rediscovering and developing an art form which is fairly unique, meeting many like-minded and gifted artists, and making friends all over the world through our shared love of paper arts. This has been a wonderful journey and I have loved every minute of it. However, I’m at a bit of a crossroads right now. I have so many areas I want to explore; working with metals, wood, fabrics, leather, and plastics, using CNC routers and lasers and plasma cutters and 3D rapid prototyping… but I don’t have the time, resources, or knowledge to do these things. This has led me to the decision that I really need to find a school or university where I can learn all about these technologies and techniques, and put them to good use making my own artistic visions become reality. … And I’ve hit a stumbling block. Most of the schools I am looking at offer either focused Paper and …

Hanatsubaki, Nov 2008, No. 701, originally uploaded by EricGjerde. Shiseido’s in-house fashion magazine, Hanatsubaki (Camelia Flower). Shiseido is a high-end Japanese cosmetics company, and Hanatsubaki has been in continuous print since 1937 with a subscriber base of over 9 million. (thanks Wikipedia!) I am part of a small story on origami and design process, or something to that effect – along with some material from Robert J. Lang and Yuko Nishimura, both artists whom I respect very much. I would be very interested to know what this article says, so if someone out there is willing to translate this for me I would greatly appreciate it! It’s a bit out of place, in some respects, with much of the content in the remainder of the magazine… it’s primarily about fashion and design, a lifestyle culture product. It’s quite interesting, but I must admit it was a bit of a surprise for one of their writers to ask me to participate and do an interview. I had a good time, though, and it was helpful for …

Oceania Box, originally uploaded by cedison. Our friend Christine Edison posted these fantastic boxes – something she first made about four years ago. The blue one is a new version, slightly modified with additional pleats, and she’s thinking of teaching it this year at the Origami USA convention in NYC. I have to say that I’m completely in love with this blue box. The curving shape, the textures of both the elephant hide paper and the spiking, ridged pleats – it’s a beautiful piece of art. I want to see it folded on a grand scale out of some kind of marvelous leather, all shiny and smooth. It reminds me of a leather pillow that I saw on Pietro Seminelli’s website – www.seminelli.fr – but it looks like he has done a site update and I can’t find an image of it anymore, sadly. I believe there is a photo of it (or a similar pattern) in Jean-Charles Trebbi’s book, L’art du pli. It features a wide array of pleating and folding eye-candy – a …

The Origami Tessellations group on Flickr created a contest for the month of October, asking people to create octagonally-themed works to celebrate our lonely eight-sided friend and all of his creative possibilities. My deepest apologies to all of your for the delay in choosing and awarding the winners of this contest – sometimes life has a way of becoming very busy and suddenly two months have passed in the blink of an eye. As penance for being two months late in my judging, I’ve added some additional prizes to this contest: Three contestants will receive a one year Flickr pro membership! I’d like to thank everyone for participating and contributing such beautiful artwork – so many varieties and methods of folding, I was really astounded to see the diversity of ideas at play in all of your creations! I think everyone who has created something here and shared it with the world is a winner, and you should all be proud of the artwork you have created. So without further ado, here are the three …