4 days

1134: AMOS

| wonko

1: Knock knock.
2: Who's there?
1: Amos
2: Amos who?
1: A Mosquito. <insert hysterical laughter of a little kid (me) amused by the first dad joke he can remember his dad telling him> True story.

I have bought many sheets of the most amazing paper, all dutifully stored in my “cave”. Over 10 years ago, I purchased a full sheet of black Unryushi single tissue because I HAD to have it, but having NO plan to use it.

Unryushi tissue is beautiful, painfully thin (24GSM) but gloriously adorned with visible mulberry fibres. It comes being about the stiffness of facial tissue – I misted a large window with water, rolled the sheet onto the wet glass (shiny side down) and then added a coat of MC (Methyl Cellulose) to the back side, removing air bubbles from the centre out.

Even wet, the Unryu is really strong, but to make it foldable I needed to crisp it up. I managed to cut a 60cm square, leaving a >12inch selvage for another project.

The latest Tanteidan magazine had a enthralling Mosquito design by Yoshio Tsuda and I knew I NEEDED to try it, but lots of the model is 12+ layers thick, I knew I needed some crazy thin paper … hence the Unryu. I decided to fold Version 1 of the Mozzie, knowing that Yoshio also published a crease pattern for his revised design – that will do for another day.

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1066: Star Virus

| wonko

As part of the privilege of test-folding models for a forthcoming book, I also had access to brilliant new designs. I decided I must fold one of these for myself:

Xander Perrott's "Star Virus"

This is “Star Virus”, a relative of “Space Virus” that I had already folded (from his previous book) waaaaay back in 2020 at the beginning of the global pandemic.

The form of this kusudama is glorious – star-shaped protuberances from a glorious faceted sphere – reminiscent of the most popular visualisation of the Covid 19 virus, I decided to fold it in royal purple and yellow because Covid is mutating all the time, and this I see as a mutation of the original in every way.

Xander Perrott's "Star Virus" view

They say “if at first you don’t succeed, mutate and try again” seems to be the pandemic trajectory – this model has modules that are refined, positively lock and the whole spikey ball was such fun to fold.

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1061: Bone Dragon

| wonko

Looking for a model to welcome in the new year, and also to further my Crease Pattern solving ability, I hoped this model would serve both purposes:

Bone Dragon

Part of a book I have helped edit prior to publishing, this is 1ctzH8jm0N2’s “Bone Dragon”, a CP and photodiagram sequence from the forthcoming book “Ori-Fancy 6”.

I started with a 90cm square, I divided into a 32 grid, then located the required diagonals, then begin allocating mountain and valley orientation to the creases before attempting the collapse.

Bone Dragon Views

There are lots of details here, and the initial collapse generates most of them – I buggered up the head collapse (rather I found the intricate point in point structure that would eventually become the horns too hard to do initially) but found it easy to do post-collapse, and was initially flummoxed by the feet structure until I realised a series of sinks needed to be closed-sinked, and another set needed to be open-sinks (hopefully this will be made clear in the final photo diagram annotations).

The body ends up being 30+ layers, making the necessary crimping for shaping really difficult with thick paper (I used natural Kraft paper) – there is a nice “bulk” to the body, and the body feels solid – thinner paper would make shaping less torturous.

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963: Hanji Ryu Jin

| wonko

A colleague brought me back some Hanji paper from her visit to Korea, and I was wondering what to fold with it when I stumbled across a post on Facebook describing a modular money dragon fold.

Hanji Ryu

Designed by Hieu Dang, modified & diagrammed by Lien Quoc Dat ( tutorial: youtube.com/c/LQDchannel ) to be folded from 10 x bank notes, and thought it was worth a go. When I wrestled with an american dollar, deciding it too small for me to fold, I scaled up and cut 10 x 1:2 rectangles from a burgundy sheet of Hanji, and began folding.

Made with bank notes

This reminds me a LOT of Satoshi Kamiya’s Ryu Jin 3.5, but not as many scales, still, it s a time-consuming fold, and many of the techniques are repetitive, but manageable. I found the diagrams on the head really difficult to fathom, and the low resolution images made it difficult to to work out what’s what. See for yourself.

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Hydrangea Bookmarks

| wonko

As I relax from the 365 challenge, I am finally getting the need to fold again:

Fractal folding is relaxing and yet challenging, Shuzo Fujimoto’s Hydrangea fractal seems to be able to be tessellated also.

In these 2 folds I experimented with different densities of repeat, discovering that accuracy matters – a fraction of a millimeter initially magnifies as the folding progresses. Continue reading →

631: (81/365) Four Cubes

| wonko

Sometimes a modular is deceptively complex, this 6-part modular from David Mitchell is no exception:

Four cubes, interwoven in evil ways has done my head in for days now, I simply could not (1) imagine the shape it was going to end up; and (2) make the modules connect in ways that made sense. Continue reading →

280: Infinity Cubed

| wonko

Now I got thinking about infinity, as you do, and that I could beat it by cubing it, then a modular idea struck – make an infinity out of cubes:

So I began collecting business cards – white on the back, and performed 2 simple bends (and ONLY 2) per card – then explored ways of linking them together securely using techniques I had previously discovered.

This sort of construction eats up a LOT of cards – 426 in this construction – each cube side has an inner and outer skin card, making it finished, white, smooth and lovely. This thing is HUGE, surdy and really rigid.

This took a bit of thinking out, I started it on Tuesday and, bit by bit, it coalesced into something wonderful and profoundly beautiful (well, I think it is) – such a nice intervention between old discarded business cards and the landfill they will eventually become.