4×1 rectangle

1010: Foschi’s “Black Widow”

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Determined to work on one of my known folding weaknesses (solving crease patterns), I decided to have a go at Riccardo Foschi’s “Black Widow”:

Folded from 4×1 rectangle, box pleating teases out lovely long legs, cephalothorax and abdomen. With a little magic I managed to extend some pincer-like jaws also to use up some of the paper that was otherwise lurking in the transition between the body and the legs, which was quite pleasing.

Riccardo Foschi's Black Widow

Half the job is the collapse – working out what should be mountain, what should be valley, and the order of the collapse. The rest of the work (some say the hardest bit) is in the shaping as, often, the base you collapse to only roughly corresponds to the morphology of the final form, you then need to primp, tease, thin and pose to gain model finesse.

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869: (319/365) Love is Love

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For what seems like an age, Australia has been torn apart by a divisive postal survey that the incumbent government decided was the best way to determine what the right thing to do was:

Ignoring world trends, common decency and justice, we “voted” on whether 2 people who love each other should be allowed to marry. Labelled the “Same Sex Marriage Debate”, it became an embarrassing mud slinging match as conservative bigots surfaced all sorts of reasons why this was a bad idea.

Thankfully, the majority (61%) of Australians said “Yes”, this (theoretically) now means the government has a MANDATE (hahaha, sorry, my inner 7 year old took over for a moment) to change our constitution so “Marriage” becomes a union between a loving couple, regardless of gender, orientation, hair colour, religion, IQ or political ideology. Continue reading →

822: (272/365) Excalibur

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“The Lady of the Lake,… [angels sing] …her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [singing stops] THAT is why I’m your king!”:

“Listen, strange women, lyin’ in ponds, distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. SUPREME executive power derives from a mandate of the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

“Shut up!”

“You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power, just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!” Continue reading →

688: (138/365) Max Hulme’s Chess Bishop

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Integral to the war effort, the church remains a dangerous player on the board:

This is Max Hulme’s “Bishop” – a lovely little Pontif-ish chap that is missing his golden hook and holy relic. Continue reading →

469: Fiddly Folding

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My heuristic is that we do not get mail on Fridays – not sure it is always true but mostly. Last Friday I therefore did not check the mailbox. Sunday I discovered my Tanteidan had been delivered on Friday and I had left it for nearly 2 days before opening it.

On the cover, Gen Hagiwara’s violin – a sublime fold that I have seen many fellow paper-benders succeed at folding and I was determined to give it a bash.

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403: Lang’s Organist

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I was reading the chapter on “box pleating” in Robert Lang’s “Origami Design Secrets – 2nd Ed” (one of my cherished origami books) and came across the chapter “homework” which is this Organist seated at her Wurlitzer:

This model is astonishing for a bunch of reasons. The design is clever – one piece of paper to fashion the player and the instrument, the details of both the player and instrument are well controlled, efficiently use paper and are clearly recognisable.

I upscaled, starting with a 128x32cm piece of brown Kraft paper, used a tape measure to lay in the landmark creases (although I could have folded them, it would have resulted in much more disfiguring creases in the end model so I am glad I did). In retrospect, working much smaller would have been very difficult with my fat, clumsy fingers as some of the pleating becomes very fiddly indeed (32nds and 64ths)

Initially, working with paper on this scale is problematic – simple things like “fold in half” take on epic proportions and introduce inaccuracies which seem slight at the time but compound in such a convoluted model.

There was an “ahh” moment when the box that is the body of the organ swings into place, making the keyboards and footpedals slip into place that was very satisfying.

I enjoyed folding this model, probably will not fold it again, but learned a bit about paper properties and wrangling pleats that will make future folds better I think.

What to do with her? there is the question – the resultant model is quite large (16x14x14cm) and in some places one layer thick (others much more so), but it is stable and surprisingly strong. It even has a music stand atop the organ that even “Barry Morgan” would appreciate. Suggestions?

248: Centipede

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Now yes, I will be the first to admit this is NUTS!:

But you only know half of it – this is my SECOND centipede folded today – you see I learned a general principle: how to tease legs out of a straight edge, and I got … a little … carried away. I should have been taken away for doing this twice in one day – 2 HOURS each creepy crawley, and some sore hands to finish with but it was so totally worth it – hahahaha.

This model is based on Peter Engel’s Centipede, although I found many of the steps incomprehensible so sort of “improvised” and I think it is rather special – ONE piece of paper, 32 (yes, that is right THIRTY TWO!!!) legs, a rather splendid mandible and antennae and some of them stickey-outey-tail-things they have.

Folding on this scale is crazy (thank goodness for fingernails) – the problem is finding a piece of paper LARGE enough to make this model not torture (both times I failed, cutting the largest 4×1 I could out of an A3 sheet). At this scale the feet are very difficult to fold with fat clumsy fingers, and it was a days work just to stop the paper tearing. Just for the record, NEITHER centipede suffered paper fatigue, splits or tears – that in itself is a miracle.

The technique is extensible, and, given longer pieces of paper I can make more legs – very nifty trick that I will remember as any straight edge now is a candidate for a row of stickey outey things.

129: Making a Spectacle

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Now I had this idea that with box pleating it should be possible to make life-size spectacles:

So I set about experimenting, discovered that I could form 6×6 lenses, a nose bridge and some reasonable length arms with a 4×1 rectangle cut from an A3 sheet:

Quite cool – an original invention, chuffed with the result. hope you like them also – the ultimate in UV protection (and all light for that matter)

Don’t pretend like you do not want to look this cool 😛

And for those faithful following this nonsense, here is my crease pattern/plan so you can have a go yourself:

85: House Gecko

| wonko

Recently I have noticed a proliferation of geckos around our house – after research it seems it is not a native but an introduced species. The “Asian Hose Gecko” apparently came over amongst ship cargo and now is over-competing with our native species:

I like these little fellows, even though they are illegal aliens – they eat bugs (we have not seen a roach or many moths for ages) but they get everywhere, crap inelegantly on everything and make a loud but cute “clucking” sound when they are randy – unfortunately this is usually in the middle of the night when all else is quiet and asleep.

This model was torture, and a result of poor planning on my behalf – I cut the largest 4×1 rectangle possible from an A4 page to begin this model and then realised that this was TINY (well, in fact, the model turned out LIFESIZE), given how much torsion the paper would need. The tail is lovely but was hard work, the pattern malformed the head (I dug some paper back out of the body to fix that) and the legs are clumsy (because my fat fingers could not detail stickey-outey bits that small and thick with any great precision (thank goodness for fingernails).

Taken from “Origami 4” by Robert Harbin, designed by Max Hulme, it is a little beauty nonetheless, quite chuffed it worked first-fold when in reality it looked like it was going to hell at a number of junctures. I must try this one bigger.