I started this fold near the end of last year, shelving it when the marking hit it’s peak and realised I had not got back to it:
Playing around with a tiny (4mm) triangle grid, initially I was just testing my patience and accuracy to see how small and accurate I could fold the grid. The paper contains a lot of cotton fibre so is pretty tough and withstood a week of punishing bone-folder-assisted creasing before I then tried to work out what to do with it. Continue reading
Who could have foreseen that the concurrence of a series of parallel mountain folds interspersed between a series of concentric parabolic valley folds would result in something with such sculptural simplicity?:
This is Jun Mitani’s “Spheroid”, well, at least as close as I could get to it by guessing the intervals between parallel lines and the curve on the parabolic ones. Continue reading
Brickwork tessellations are a bit of work, but it is nice to see a model that uses the tessellation as the texture of another structure:
This is Ichiro Kinoshita’s “Fireplace by Brickwork”, a torturous fold that requires a ton of pre-creasing and as the scale I chose (square cut from an A3 sheet), the final crease lines end up about 4mm apart on fairly heavy paper – not, in retrospect, a good choice. Continue reading
We are heading into assignment season in many of my classes – this means my students are busy getting on with it, occasionally asking for help, but I am stuck there inert and when I get bored I get naughty:
…so I fold stuff to keep me awake. Modulars have an advantage that, once you have mastered the module, it is largely “rinse and repeat” until the final assembly. Continue reading
Potter Nerds and Minecraft Nerds unite, for I present to you a “Minecraft” style cubey golden snitch:
This buzzy little bugger would be difficult to catch in a full on game of Quidditch indeed. This is Riccardo Foschi’s “CuBird”, an interesting little CP that collapses with a little wrangling to make a lovely little cube and enough paper to fan out a quite solid set of wings. Continue reading
I must admit I like folding modulars – sure they take a little while but the concurrence of units to whole is a fascinating process:
This is David Mitchell’s “Omicron” – a fascinating block modular that, when folded with the right paper, looks solid and impossible. Continue reading
For those of you keeping up, you will notice SOME of the posts on this blog have numbers. The first number (in this case 600) represents a catalogue of sorts – it documents the number of new models that I have never folded, before documenting it here:
Jo Nakashima’s “6” is new for me, the “0” is a refold but, yeah, 600!!!! Continue reading
Starting with 2 squares of paper, some simple creasing, an odd thing happens – a solid shape emerges:
This squarish donut is odd, it slides together with nearly no folding and creates an interesting geometry. Continue reading
Puddling around in an old Tanteidan magazine, I noticed that the first few pages are usually devoted to smaller folding projects – often modular in nature:
This 2-part modular is fascinating and initially I found it baffling as the diagrams were not really clear (the illustrator was trying to represent stages that were 3d in 2d line drawings) and the instructions are all in Japanese. Continue reading
Now I know there are those who say that Valentines Day is a Hallmark business opportunity, but I happen to think that celebrating someone you love is a good thing:
My valentine loves to read, so I thought a pair of Washi Deluxe bookmarks would not go astray. Continue reading
Paper-influenced materials engineering has gained incredible momentum in the last few years as ancient and modern folding techniques get applied to modern materials:
The Miura Ori fold is a fascinating corrugation that takes large flat surfaces, divides them up into “shallow” parallelograms, re-arranges the creases into alternate rows of mountain and valley across the folded field to make a self-organising surface. Continue reading
As a teacher and pastoral care “tutor”, I am always looking for ways to get kids working together. At the beginning of the year the tutor group room is a mixed-year level (6-12) mixture of strangers and established friends so “GTK” exercises (Getting To Know you) are great icebreakers if you can get them actually talking and working together:
A few years back I struck on an idea to get kids collaboratively folding an origami mega-structure. The model is fairly simple – I taught the newbies (in this case the year 6 and 7 students) a simple modular unit. They then had to go teach another kid in the group, who in turn taught another. The central metaphor is “the WHOLE is greater than the sum of the parts”, “many hands make light work”, “we are as strong as the weakest link” … and so on.
This delightful 6-part modular cube is designed by Meenakshi Mukerji:
The modules cleverly isolate a colour-changed heart at the centre of a “U” shaped module that forms one side of the cube. Continue reading
Trolling around in my collection of Tanteidan magazines, as one does, I came across a little 6-piece modular designed by Jun Maekawa:
Oddly named until you notice that each of the modules is a little “house” shape, complete with pitched roof. Continue reading
Leafing through “Folding Australia” I came across an odd modular that results in half and three quarters of a cube:
Simple folding, deft locking mechanism and a little geometric brain bending. Continue reading
