{Voila} Origami Inspirations

Taro found a specialty origami center in Tokyo where they have a plethora of beautiful papers in different sizes, colors, textures, and more.  We're making origami cranes for our name holders but the cheap paper (Koma' brand) has a blue that is just not working with our color palettes.  

Taro found a rich navy blue paper at the store in a large size and they offered to cut the stock for us. Each sheet created about 11 smaller size papers.  The store's workers really enjoyed hearing about our pan-pacific romance and took the time to make sure we found exactly what we needed.  

We visited the top floor which had the paint color workshop for the origami paper.   The beautiful designs you see on certain papers are painted directly on by the gentleman.  These papers were much more expensive than what we could afford, but so beautiful to look at. 

Some brushes are made from sheep hair (softest, most cover), some are horse hair (a bit stiffer, made for more controlled painting), some are striped in different shapes and sizes to create different patterns on the paper.

Here, he's painting one side of the paper with the vat of glittering gold paint.  The yellow base makes the gold a warmer tone.  If he wanted to dye the paper thoroughly, he dunks the entire paper in the big silver vat to the left.  The origami dragons are created with multiple interlinking origami pieces.  The finished pieces are brushed with gold.

A finished crane: 

Once completed, the cranes will be the nameholders at the table for each guests.  Taro's mom has graciously offered to fold all 250 pieces for us -- we're quite grateful since it takes us so much longer.  Once she's done, I might add a bit of gold like the inspiration dragons above.