729: (179/365) A Whole Lotta Love

Searching for daily folds, O came across an interesting 6 part modular cube that has much development potential:

each face features a colour changed heart but I imagine that with a little inventiveness you could fashion diamonds, spades etc, or other things as the basic module solves the problem of liberating colour-changed flaps rather nicely. Continue reading

728: (178/365) Bumpy Octahedron

So you take a 2×1 rectangle, fold it into 4×2 squares, then halve the squares:

Then bring one pair of adjacent corners for each square, sink the dimply corner to lock, then repeat. Continue reading

727: (177/365) Anibal Voyer’s Pegasus

I am Pegasus, my name means “horse”:

I have had this “must try someday” pile for ages, thought I would give it a go. The fold sequence is tricky and that was not helped but the fact that the square I started with was not .. actually … square. Continue reading

726: (176/365) Star Block

Sometimes a simple crease pattern leads to some interesting emergent geometry:

This is Charles Santee’s “Star Block”, a 2 part modular that I found when trolling among Origami USA’s “The Fold” issue #22. Continue reading

725: (175/365) 145 Point Sea Urchin

So I ended up scoring an unexpected free afternoon so decided that serious paper torture would be fun:

Gridding then a breathtaking collapse took 4 hours to begin with. I knew I was up for a marathon fold to finish. Annoyingly I did not get this finished before fatigue took me – sometimes you get that. Continue reading

724: (174/365) School Holidays!

After a brutally busy term, it is time to recharge, dance a little, be thankful for the good things that surround you:

This is Jeremy Shafer’s “The Dancers” – a charming little pleating exercise that takes a square (in this case a 15cm Japanese foil square) and, via a clever set of collapses, isolates 2 people, joined at the hand. Continue reading

723: (173/365) Feathered Tsuru

Few would argue that the Tsuru (crane) is the quintessential origami figure. Everybody starts there, the form is so familiar and the skills necessary to fold it form the backbone of so many models:

While I have tried many variations of this model, few compare to Riccardo Foschi’s “feathered Tsuru”, a glorious and complex variation with such beautiful wings. Continue reading

722: (172/365) Baby Dragon

Reporting is a beast of a thing, particularly semester reporting where we seem to joust with nit-picking grammar on parts of a report that parents do not read. Slaying the beast is particularly satisfying:

This is Riccardo Foschi’s Baby Lizard Dragon … thing. I found the CP and a photo of the finished model and thought ‘how hard could this be?’. Continue reading

721: (171/365) Kythera Dreaming

A colleague recently spent an extended time back home on Kythera, a lovely island in Greece:

Returning to work is never easy after such time away, but I can feel and understand her longing to return. This shell is meant to evoke dream memories of Kythera. Continue reading

720: (170/365) Cylinder Twists

When you are sitting, you have a bunch of time to think. When you have cylindrical media on hand, you start to think about what you can do with it:

Having previously dabbled in loo-roll faces, I began wondering if there was some geometric beauty in cylinder wrangling and happened across a scalable technique that allows a twist without completely breaking the cylindrical form. Continue reading

719: (169/365) Jason Ku’s Duck

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it probably is a duck:

This is an intense little model that eats paper like few others. The body is heavy and shaping I found difficult because of the many layers. Continue reading

717: (167/365) Michael LaFosse’s Le Papillon de Nuit

Le Papillon de Nuit translates, roughly as “The Night Butterfly” – a charming fold with a lovely detailed abdomen:

Unlike the other La Fosse butterflies, this one works and then re-works layers on the wings, making the finished model smaller but unique in shape. Continue reading

716: (166/365) Michael LaFosse’s Mudarri Luna Moth

Catching up, finally, and continuing exploration of the form, this is a luna moth: apparently the main difference between a moth and a butterfly is that moths typically do not have winds that meet above the body – I may have just made that up:

I like the slight “swallowtail” formation here – lots of work pre butterfly formation in getting proportions right makes this seem graceful. Continue reading

715: (165/365) Michael LaFosse’s Butterfly for Russell Cashdollar

Yes, I know, it is a day late, but i have been busy marking, so, yeah:

This is another Michael LaFosse butterfly – more fancy than most with the pleaty zig zags adding decorative touches. Continue reading