Between the Folds

A couple of months ago my oldest and youngest joined forces and began to subscribe to Netflix. Now, every night after his shower, my youngest and I watch an episode of “Intervention”. My son claims that he is now addicted to the show. Yes, the show does make doing drugs seem like a really icky thing to do. I’m not complaining.

 

Netflix has caused other changes in my household. I used to work out during the week to “The Today Show” for about 30 minutes. That was about as much patience as I could muster up for the  “Today Show” mix of teeny bits of actual news mixed with lots of grisly murder and how to save money.

 

These days I will watch three episodes of “ Say Yes! to the Dress” in a row , which come to 66 minutes.  Today I decided to watch this documentary.

Trailer for “Between the Folds

 

 

When I was in grade school several of my friends were seriously into origami. I learned how to make a couple of forms but didn’t really get into origami until right after college. I was then running a five day a week after school class for a group of 3-6 year olds.  I know, no one would ever plan a group for that wide an age span anymore.  But that’s the group that I had.  The group met five days a week for, I think two and a half or three hours. One of the activities I had the kids do, was origami.  I had started out using the directions that came with the packages of origami paper. after a while I had purchased a wonderful tiny but packed full book from japan from the Museum of Natural History

 

I discovered that they could all  create even the most complicated forms if I sat all of us at a round table and didn’t speak.  I would demonstrate each step and wait for each of them to complete it, helping out the kids that needed a bit more help. If we were all quiet, then all of the kids could make the most complicated origami forms. using words just made it harder.

 

Doing the origami with the kids was a favorite activity in the group. Sometimes I would tell them ahead of time what we were making. Sometimes I let them be surprised by the results. it was meditative. They were also pushed beyond what any of them thought they could do. we used to make both small scale origami using traditional origami paper, we also used to work large scale using 36 inch rolls of Kraft paper to make giant sized birds and frogs.

 

I haven’t made origami in years. Watching “Between the Folds” I also thought about how I solved the problem of how to work on Diane’s tallit using my old paper folding skills transferred to silk organza.