I was exploring a corrugation technique I last used with Eric Joisel’s Bandoneon and stumbled across a sort of plan to fold Joisel’s Snail:

You start with an extraordinarily long (my estimate – 3.25m) and narrow (in my model 9cm) strip of paper, then start folding slanted lines (using a 3:1 gradient) in both directions

Adding valley folds that intersect diagonal vertices creates a luscious crinkle that eats paper like nothing else.

Adding a taper, it sort of suggests a snakey thing that then can be coiled up and sort of piled upon the rest of the paper that, with a clever series of 3 accordion pleats makes feelers and reverses the direction of the paper to make the snails foot.

Handling paper of this size (indeed even cutting it with any accuracy) was a real challenge; the myriad of folds were easy if brutally repetitive but the end effect is every bit a snail

I like this model a lot but cannot see how it can be held together without a little bit of help – the foot has some double-sided tape keeping it in shape but the snail shell coil is loose and I am sure when the cleaning lady knocks it, it will cascade in awkward and alarming ways onto the floor.

I can also see huge potential for this technique – old style gas masks and other tubey-things, but I would probably start with a wider section first – more modeling potential at both ends.

This was WTF # 17 – how did you go at guessing what it was?