I have this image in my head – last day of Dalek highschool, a bunch of Daleks more and more excitedly rattling off “Matriculate! Matriculate!”:
Yesterday another cohort of seniors left school to join the journey to the next phase of their life. I am blessed to have taught some of them. For a teacher there is no greater gift than an enquiring mind that wants to learn. Continue reading
I have been looking for a nice pelican (yes, I know that is an odd thing to say, but good pelican origami models are hard to find):
This is the best I have found so far, and although it is not free-standing, contains much that is pelicanny.
Lovely bill, nice feet (if a little thin and spindly) and the vestiges of nice wings, I think I will keep looking.
Folded after returning home from a conference (lots of nice people sharing). Busy times, sometimes you get that.
Now I like a good challenge, but this was a little beyond the pale:
I have seen photos of this model less than half as big and I am buggered if I can work out how you could fold it that small as I struggled at this scale.
A fascinating exercise in box pleating that makes the peggy things and the pitty things on the same surface of a page, then bending it into a self-locking box – wow!
I can see how this could scale infinitely, adding rows of pegs and pits but I am glad I chose only 2 of each as this alone took me an age to nut out – I had a practice with each component first (the site I found it suggested this was a good idea (well, at least I think it did, I cannot read Italian very well.
Why lego? Well, I have been playing with lego robots for a week or so in prep for a robotic unit with year 10 students – lots of fun.
You should have a go at this yourself here
We live in a fairly quiet suburb and we like (not often enough sadly) to go for walks – as do dog owners who do it as much to get some exercise as to “empty their pet”:
I saw this exercise in box pleating and thought it had promise – starting with a grid of 24ths, you collapse and form a dog with leg cocked.
The tree (as per the instructions) was merely a fan – I thought that a bit boring so added some extra pleating to make a couple of branches and proceeded to add a fork in the trunk and some semi-crumpled foliage. With a little more crumpling the shapes would be nice and soft and gum-tree foliage like which is what I was aiming for.
I left it angular, as homage to the original design and to make it explicit what I had done to modify it – love it or hate it, I am pretty chuffed it worked given how fiddly the dog was. The little wee doggy has nice ears, an open mouth, four nicely formed legs (one lifted against the tree) and a floppy tail – nice.
In simpler times, music was encoded onto black plastic discs as bumpy valleys a needle would bounce along to extract the sound. In even simpler times that sound was amplified by a large cone, no electricity involved at all:
These days it is all iPods, mp3s, downloads and stealing music – sometimes the older, simpler times were best – certainly stereo turntables create a lovely chocolatey sound that modern digital sampling techniques have lost.
Why a grammophone? the kids at school perform in the formal concert tonight – the symbol of music for me is “His Master’s Voice” which was a grammophone with a dog looking quizzically at it.
This is an interesting box-pleating exercise that at almost every step looked like it was going to hell in a hand-basket. The final opening of the cone was a revelation.
Amusingly my daughter saw on my screen the words “Pagina precedente” and “Pagina successiva” and immediately assumed I was looking at something naughty – when in fact the instructions were in Italian. Folded in 1/12ths, with an interesting collapse to put the record on the turntable first, I like this a lot and hope you do to.
You can have a go yourself also: http://www.origamidauria.it/diagrammi/diagrammigrammofono/grammofono1.htm
