I'm Irish but I live in England. I started folding in september 2010 shortly before Eric Joisel's death. sadly I had no clue who he was until a few months later. anyway i folded my first crane that september, along with flapping birds and shirikens and all that stuff. a few weeks into my hobby i searched on the internet for a challenge and came up with tadashimori's tutorial for lang's frog. thanks Tadashi! anyway my first one was a printer paper disaster but i practised it and used tissue paper and got a good result. I found lang's website and discovered the true magic of origami art. the next step i took was getting ods by lang. i got some good models from it and folded my first "super complex" models, like the moose and clock. i never got good paper then so i was stuck with brown wrapping paper. then i got insects II by the same guy, made some with wrapping paper again. then I got some tant, my first proper paper, and remade some ods models.
last year though i lived my first dream of origami: to make the ancient dragon. when i thought i was at the right level I got works of kamiya satoshi and a sheet of terry's copper tissue foil, practised on brown paper and made it with the foil. that was a few weeks ago. I now design a few things, although i have a lot to learn, fold super complex stuff, more recently phoenix 3.5, and i hope to be able to learn fluently design crease patterns. i am not amazing at designing but i want to show that i can master the art. i have no time though as i'm at boarding school, with no folding materials and too much work.
sorry that i wrote my whole life story but i had to write it somewhere! thanks for reading if you managed to get this far!