ProjectW

Short-Beaked Echidna

| wonko

There are only a few origami figures I MUST have in my collection – Steven Casey’s “Echidna” is one of these:

This adorable little monotreme is covered in one of my favourite square-grid tessellations, but skillfully crafted to allow all the other body bits to be where they need to.

I bought the British Origami Society booklet describing how to fold this treasure as soon as I knew it existed, and have folded it a few times now. Some sequences are nightmare fuel – this one is just so enjoyable to fold.

I recently received a shipment of paper from Origami-shop.com and in it was a 65cm 11 colour pack of the NEW Shadow Thai paper. I last bought it in 40cm square form but it was THICK so to my delight this version is thinner and takes complex folds really nicely. I chose this fur-like colour because it most closely matched the quill and hair colour of an echidna.

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Lyrebird

| wonko

One of the few applications of the Miura-Ori (map fold) that I can tolerate folding is to make the fantail of Satoshi Kamiya’s Lyrebird.

I had a half-sheet of leaflitter paper in my stash (bought some 8 years ago) and thought it fitting to fold a bird that lives in the leaflitter out of it.

This is not my first fold of this beautiful model, but it is my best. Having good, thin, tough paper helps as accuracy is everything when folding the base – so many opportunities for crease misalignment exist and, as the paper thickness ramps up, there is bulk there.

Interestingly, the “bulk” ends up being in the body area which then naturally “fattens up” the bird in a really naturalistic way.

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