The beginning of another month, and I am finding it difficult to find rabbits to fold:
This is Stephen O’Hanlon’s rabbit – a simple figurative fold that is suitably rabbitty for the “pinch and punch first day of the month”.
I cannot believe this heralds the last quarter of this project (10th month starting).
Now I am going visiting to the Sunshine Coast today, so thought something marine would be appropriate:
This lovely dolphin reminds me of “flipper” who appeared to frolic in the sea. The sad truth about captive dolphins however is that they lead miserable, confused lives and have a really short lifespan due to stress and noise in their tanks. There is increasing and justified pressure to release dolphins and orcas from captivity as it is inhumane.
The design for this model is ingenius, the body is triangular in cross-section, lovely tail flukes, sharp dorsal and pectoral fins and a beak, with open mouth.
It was difficult to photograph this model, so I perched it (via a blob of blutac) atop a mangled paperclip. Well dome Mr Brill
When my sister was little, she used to call elephants “Nollentonks“:
No idea why, the name just stuck. My daughter also likes elephants so i am on the search for a good one. This little beauty measures in at 8cm trunk to tail.
This is John Montroll’s African Elephant. A lovely model that I now regret folding at this scale (I am running short of A3-cut squares, so used an A4 instead). Getting the elephantine proportions and general shape were tough work at this scale, but the model is a good one and the inner nollentonk shone through in the end,
Lovely ears and tusks, waggly tail and nice solid body make this model a winner, one I will fold again.
The Spanish Origami Society (ASOCIACIÓN ESPAÑOLA DE PAPIROFLEXIA) feature a number of folders with unique approaches to model design, this is a cute rat:
A fairly compact model, suggestive of features rather than folding every detail.
I think it captures the spirit of a rat quite well, well a nice playful one rather than a plague-infested nasty.
Nice ears, face and tail, and a plump little 3d body combine to make a neat model for today.
“I am Pegasus, my name means horse…” – I am old enough to remember a folksey song by Ross Ryan about a mythological winged horse:
I had some time, amidst trips and other things today so thought I would give Satoshi Kamiya’s Pegasus a go – it has been taunting me from the pages of his book.
This delightful horse is remarkably horse-like (which I guess is a bonus) but also has the most lovely wings, I am very pleased with how it turned out.
Dainty little ears, lovely head, nifty legs – one bent as if about to take flight, with hooves, a flowing tail, just a masterpiece of design that takes such a big sheet of paper (over 30cm square of tissue foil) and reduces it to a lovely little 8-10 cm model).
There were many instances where i had to just get up and leave this model for a while – tricky, precise and the layers get so thick – I cannot imagine attempting this with regular paper. Keeping the legs sharp and shaping the body through all those layers was tough work – very happy with this as a first fold however.
Yes, a discrete round of applause would be appropriate.
Barbz asked me to make a deer, I decided to look for a stag (antlers etc) and found one by Neal Elias:
I like this model – out of a severe box pleat a fairly graceful body, legs and head with lovely ears and antlers emerges.
This was a tough fold – the thicknesses near the nead are really difficult to fold, but the result is quite satisfying as a forst fold – hope you ike it Barbz.
I have also found a bunch of deer-like animals, will experiment more with the form.
On September 9, 2001, a virtual environment called TerraMOO was first launched.
An intersting date given a couple of days later the WORLD changed forever. terraMOO is an Encore-based MOO, it has run continuously for the past 10 years, even though boys have constantly tried to break it – name another technology that can come close?
As a learning environment I believe it is unequaled, providing chat rooms, object-oriented programming, web publishing, online interactive assessment and smart objects there is nothing that comes close.
Yes, I have played and developed in 3d worlds, yes I understand their potential also, but a MOO is unique – long may she run.
This cow I have been saving, the folding was intense but the end cow-shape is most pleasing – lovely ears, horns and a serene facial expression, good body proportions and a lovely swishy tail.
Now I have been on a mission to find and fold Alix a giraffe for her birthday (Happy Birthday Alix!) and the model had some criteria:
Voila! We have a Giraffe – I found these instructions on the interweb but no credit was given to the designer – can anyone help me here?
I rejected models by Peter Engel, Robert Lang, John Montrol for one or all 3 reasons above having folded them and barely achieving an acceptable model using plain copy paper (which is much more forgiving that the giraffe print I had).
It was an interesting investigation – there will be more giraffes to come – the challenge is to adequately represent the “spirit” of the animal rather than necessarily be accurate with the morphology as they are such an odd collection of animal bits really (almost as odd as a platypus). No model I found had the lovely long knobbly kneed legs and the vaguely trapezoidal body for instance but various models had aspects that looked correct.
To get the long neck and distant body when using a square so much paper has to be tucked away that it gets really dense, but it ends up with lovely ears, and vestigial “horns” which I have never worked out what they do.
Hope Alix likes it;
Happy Fathers Day also to all those Dads out there, hope you also have a good day.
A Pinch and a punch (well, more correctly a sink, pleat and reverse fold – lol, origamist joke there) for the first of the month:
This nice little rabbit is a clever use of a 2×1 rectangle and has a pleasing shape – heaps of modelling potential beyond the base fold.
Designed in 2008 by Hoang Tine Quyet, it is in my top 5 rabbit models already – such a cute tail and some flopsy ears also.
It was also Helpdesk Chris’s 21st Birthday today – yay – I made him a user-friendly computer guy, because, well, Chris is a user-friendly computer guy:
Happy 21st Birthday Chris, hope you had a fun day!
Now I have been told off by Dr Winston O’Boogie for folding creepy crawlys and scary things and was told I should concentrate on unicorns and rainbows:
This is John Montrol’s Unicorn – a relatively simple fold with a nice horsey shape.
So much paper folded inside, it ends up having a plump body and very thick legs and a lovely twirly unicorn stickey-uppey horney thing
This will do me for unicorns for the moment, although I will be on the look out for another one as the horse shape is one much folded by origami designers as it is quite difficult to capture the equine profile.
A simple model for today:
A nice little goat – poseable, with some lovely horns, this goaty model is free standing and an interesting use of a waterbomb at one end of a 2×1 rectangle.
Staff meeting, late home, felt a little like livestock being led to slaughter, you get that. Top that off with falling asleep in front of the telly. 
As mentioned previously, Captain Fainty has a sidekick:
Now it must be said that this sidekick is more of a liability than an asset – as is true for all cats really (let’s be honest), and there is little evidence that this sidekick is even remotely interested in being labelled as such. There is even less evidence that this sidekick has actually performed even the minimum of sidekick duties – you get that apparently.
This is a Joisel fold, and I will probably fold it again now I know what goes where, but I am fairly happy with this as a first fold – he looks like he is slinking – something cats are wont to do, prior to a bout of narcolepsy.
A relatively simple fold with lots of potential for modelling and expression, the posture is lovely but the legs are a little dense and fiddly at small scale.
I have always loved oddball humour, and when I discovered the panels by Gary Larson I became an addict, buying everything he published. His acerbic observations of scientific concepts amused me greatly, combined with his caveman humour and we come close to my fav Larson comic of all time – the experiments in early microscopy shown in this panel. This is doubly accurate as, unlike dinosaurs, Mammoths are a relatively recent extinction, with frozen specimens found still to have plant material in their gut and butchery marks on their bones – I guess Mammoth burgers were tasty to early hominids.
Looking for elephantine, I came across a Woolly mammoth in “Origami Zoo” by Robert Lang thus completing a “hat-trick” of models by him:
this figurative mammoth is lovely – seemingly correct morphologically, the hunched and raised shoulders and relatively demure hind quarters, lovely curly tusks, placid expression and gently curling trunk
This model was nearly a fail, using copy paper – some very thick layers inside make shaping the body very difficult an the paper fatigue nearly split at the shoulders – gently gently was necessary at the collapse stage.
Very happy with this as a first fold, and will fold it again I think with some nice textured paper – this would probably work in large format also as you could model toes and a more complete facial expression. I used a square cut from A3 copy paper and the final model was small and tight – thinner paper would have helped I guess.
Tomorrow marks the beginning of Science Week and I thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with a lab rat:
This delightful model by Robert Lang has a lovely shape but is very cruel on the paper it is made from (so much so that it split due to tension and fatigue along the neck and back)
I like this base, and am satisfied with this as a first fold of the model – I learnt a lot attempting it and will fold it again with more suitable paper I think – copy paper is a cruel mistress sometimes.
I like a figurative compound model, and when it is designed by a master like Akira Yoshizawa then it feels like a privilege to fold it:
This is one of his monkeys, in two pieces – I love the pose, the simple but expressive face, posture and all – very clever.
Made with 2 bird bases, then each part diverging in method yet strangely symmetric, coalescing into a top and tail that then slots together.
This is a lot like the more complex “swivel monkey” which I will torture myself with later, for my first fold I am happy with this result. Taken from “Creative Origami”, a masterwork entirely in Japanese, most models have no landmarks, you fold them by eye, making each fold unique and allowing the folder to add their own character – nice.
