Mui-Ling Teh

(If you’ve only added me to your watchlist recently and don’t know me very well, this journal would be easier to understand if you read my profile description first.)

Hello everyone :o)

Well, it’s been about 2 months since I finished my previous school semester. It feels good to be back in this community again; though I’m still falling greatly behind. I already expected that I cannot be as active as I was before Rome; but at the same time London is keeping me busier than I expected. My job has been pretty stressful; I’ve had to work a lot of overtime and sometimes I brought work home over the weekend. Things have been crazy; for myself and the world; Recession, sudden heavy snowfalls (back in Canada that’s normal, but here in London it caused so much commotion to the extent that public transportation got suspended), Victoria wildfires…

I’ve been working hard; but I’m in a different city so I also go out a lot and make the most out of it. I’ve written to my previous supervisor long ago about how I spent New Years, and he said I’ve done more in one day than many Londoners do in their lifetime world (Can read about my New Year’s eve here then in the comments I added how I spent New Years day). Since then I’ve been visiting many museums and galleries, and once in a while spending the day outdoors. The past few weeks have also been full of activity due to the Chinese New Years festivities. This year is the year of the Ox; a strong animal that endures hardship, and we too must endure during this difficult period. While this may be a difficult period, people know how to have a good time here. Things have been getting busy at work lately, but thankfully I’ve done a lot before I started working, and I do as much as I can on the days I go out.

While I was studying in Rome I had not uploaded any new origami works (aside from origami calendars) on Redbubble, but my collection has actually been growing. The past semester the profs would often urge us to arrive some place by a certain time, only to end up waiting there for a long time before getting a tour or before the bus arrives. So I killed my time by making little miniatures. I’ve been doing the same at work; in my office I don’t have a permanent desk; so whenever the staff are finding a free desk for me, I’m either standing around, or doing origami.

There was also once a blackout; hence we could not do work on our computers, which we rely on heavily. So I was doing origami while waiting for the power to come back, and apparently the person in front of me was also killing time with origami! He has the most awesome calendar :o) each day of the month has a set of origami instructions for different kinds of paper planes (you make the plane out of the calendar paper of the previous day; which would have the fold lines marked on it). This happened during the last week of January; which meant that the following Friday the Victoria and Albert Museum would be holding its Friday late event (which they do every last Friday of the month). The January 2009 event was in honour of Chinese New Year, and many workshops took place. I spent the evening at the “Fortune Boats” workshop, where I learned to fold a fortune boat. I tried doing some miniature ones (looks like I have not mastered that yet) and just for fun I did a bunch of other miniatures. So now my miniature origami collection (since September 2008 – earlier creations are back home in Canada) looks like this:

Anything that is red – or that has any hint of red – was done at the Victoria and Albert museum. Usually I do my miniature origami with a square piece cut from a sheet of lined paper, and sometimes trace paper. At the museum I was provided actual origami paper :o). On the very left I have sasanqua flowers like the one in my Bloomed from Fingers. Next to the sasanquas are lilies; I’ve folded normal sized ones in my Substitute for a silent mouth of sorrow. Just below the lilies is a star, and below that are penguins; one of the small ones is in Penguin in a Snowstorm (the other small one is just one of those I folded during the blackout) and the bigger ones are from Arctic Playground. Above the lilies are camels (see The Search for Water).

The top middle are the fortune boats, which I learned at the museum. To the right are two different groups of sailboats (see Life is a Journey and Sailing Along the Lifeline – apparently now my most viewed work; 3070 views.), and below are my typical miniature cranes (all my origami works on RB can be seen through the link in my profile description)…

That week I really wanted to post a journal, but then I was overcome by the past two weeks by work and the Chinese New Year festivities during “China in London”. The last “China in London” event took place last weekend, and so the Chinese New Year excitement ended; though this past week brought me more surprises. On Monday as I was looking through my activity monitor I noticed that many had commented and favourited my Every Little Peace, and then I realized that it made the featured pages!

I had stopped posting journals about features for awhile but this one had me blown away; no other feature ever brought this much attention to my work (it seemed to encourage viewers to explore other works in my portfolio as well…). In fact “Every Little Peace” was not very popular initially, and now it is my third most favourited work; the day it was featured it received 12 favourites; which may possibly be the most favourites I ever got on a single piece of work in one day (that or Born from the Hand which I recall getting a lot of faves on the day I uploaded it.) In the days that followed it got 8 more favourites, so since the feature it has received 20 more favourites, and now it has 28 favourites. No doubt I was excited about the feature, and wanted to post about it right away, but there was already so much more that I wanted to share first that I didn’t know where to start. I put it off… and then the next day my latest T-shirt design Song of the Wind gets featured on the homepage!

It doesn’t end there… yesterday I got a surprise when I read a comment on my work stating that it was used as the cover image for a group challenge! And I’m not even a member of the group hosting that challenge!

So yeah, this year has been intense – stressful but exciting at the same time; and there is much more to look forward to; I’ll FINALLY be graduating this year (5 and a half year university program – it’s too long :P – and it’ll be longer IF I do masters); I have to go through the pain of a school semestre again to graduate :-P; I’ll be back in school again in May… It’s also a very important time in my life for me; a time for developing my career, and establishing what I really want to do… I’ve starting getting a clearer idea, and realy should be getting on it; but I’ve been too occupied; but for some parts, that’s actually a good thing.

Anyhoo, hope you all have a lovely weekend and thanks for reading :o)