Wednesday, April 6, 2011

GC97: Geishas

This month the Gingersnap Creations blog is TRAVELING TO THE FAR EAST! The focus will be the arts of origami and paper folding. In following with the Far East theme today's challenge is GEISHAS.

When I think of Asian art I almost always think of rice paper panels with water color images. Clean and simple at it's best! So in keeping with that, I tried for a clean and simple card.
Every now and then I get a fancy to buy Asian style embellishments, papers, stamps, etc. - but it rarely gets used. So I went to my stash and started "shopping". The first item I pulled out was some tissue/newsprint paper that had had a gold leaf block in the center. One was plane newsprint, the other had been painted orange and then gold-leafed. I pulled out two different script stamps and used black Archival ink to stamp over the gold squares.

Both geisha images are clip art I bought from eBay many years ago. I wrapped gold "Japan" thread around each card. Japan thread is a left over from my needlework days. It's a shiny gold thread. The ginger card got a gold fan embellishment.

The embellishment for the pale pink geisha card is an origami crane.

I started with a 3-inch square of paper and followed this video:


The final touch was my chop.
In 2004, my mother and I took a three week trip to China. Oh the things we saw! It was truly an amazing trip. One of the goodies I purchased for myself was a jade chop. A chop is the traditional signature on everything from official papers to art work. You'll often see a chop in red on Asian art. The chop came with a blue china bowl of red ink. It's a clay like substance that is still "wet" after all these years.

I was born in the year of the rat...so my jade block is topped with a playful rodent.

Here's my chop on the back of both cards. The Chinese chop carver uses a phonetic approximation of my name DEB into a Chinese word...I always wonder if the "translation" means something like "she eats bugs". Oh well...

Please share your Geisha creations with us on the Gingersnap Creations blog. You have a month!

11 comments:

  1. Wonderful Cards, Deb. Great name stamp- you´re right. You never know what i really means ;-)

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  2. Gorgeous work ... interesting reading about the "chop". You have done the theme proud. Welcome to Gingersnaps - I dont think I have said hello before!

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  3. Wonderful cards-the glimmery paper is fabulous on your card and the fan too. I love you 'chop' story!

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  4. Oh so lovely. The pale pink geisha card with the overstamping and oragami crane was beautiful.Enjoy creating along side you at Gingersnaps. take care, gerri

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  5. Everything is perfect- the cards, the origami, and the chop story with photo.

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  6. These are so pretty and love the gold on the first one stunning.

    Marie

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  7. Deb, these are both gorgeous pieces!

    :)

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  8. These are really lovely, I love the colour schemes you've used and the addition of the origami. I too have a chinese chop in a cupboard somewhere, must dig it out (and use it!) x

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  9. I, too, have a fascination with Oriental stuff, but don't really have any in my stamp collection. These are great cards; love the crane! Your chop is very cool...had never heard of one of those....

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  10. Both cards are amazing! Thanks for sharing how to make a crane...I am origami-challenged!

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  11. Fantastic pieces, love the origami crane.

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