Rehab transitions....Road Trip

The origami rehab project seems to be phasing out - that is, now that I'm able to go out and am attempting to return to my old routine, origami projects have lagged.

But reading has increased and road trips as well.

Yesterday we went on a great trip to the Green Mountain Spinnery. For those who visit from Ravelry no explanation is needed , but for the rest of you the Spinnery creates yarn and my wife is a consummate knitter. I love to drive, she loves to look for just the right yarn and hence we love trips to places like the Spinnery. I can usually read a chapter or two while we visit as well...

I wish I brought a camera because unlike any other yarn store we visit the Spinnery manufacture their yarn on site. In fact the store is tiny - the yarn making machinery takes up the bulk of the building. Did I mention I love old machinery lately? We didn't realize the Spinnery allowed visitor to tour the place or that they used old equipment so it was a great treat and surprise when we arrived and were shown each machine and given an explanation for it's purpose.

The Spinnerys web site has a nice virtual tour which includes all the steps involved in creating the yarn; the history about each machine is also nicely documented. perhaps next time we go I'll get images; till then enjoy their site.

So far so good

So the Origami portion of this blog started shortly after i had my left hip replaced and this week was the follow up visit.  The xrays looked good! The image to the right is my new hip...all metal and cement-less.

The manufacturer product page has the details on the hip including details of the tools and methods used to install it. Pretty fascinating stuff.

I'll return to origami posts once I get the next model  finished, I still have those 30 components to assemble.

Origami Rehab

With time on my hands I decided to try origami as a way to pass the time while my hip rehabs.

I started by attempting to fold models from a kit i had purchased at the MIT museum store a week or so before surgery.  The kit was of "Geometric Origami" and I quickly found even the most basic cube and tetrahedrons were not folding well. I decided either I didn't understand what I was doing or the instructions in the booklet were poor.....so i searched the intertubes for traditional origami to both practice folding and learn from a source other then the booklet that came with the geometric kit.

Over the last couple of weeks I've spent hours folding traditional Origami - starting with boxes and then moving on to flowers and animals, returning to the cube and tetrahedron that i had been unable to do originally.  As it turns out my first attempts were failing both because of my ineptitude and the poor quality paper in the kit. Martha picked up some origami paper at michael's  (the Paper Store didn't have any - go figure) and that made a huge difference.

The following posts include most of the models I've made - in some cases it took many practice models to get to one good example - others just folded up fine the first time.