453: The Age Of Aquarius

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!


I saw a crease pattern whilst trolling through the Origami Forum that looked like it was relatively straight forward to lay out on a piece of paper, based on fairly well controlled 64th grid with some fairly straightforward easy to locate landmarks and so thought I would give it a go.

It took nearly 2 days to lay all the creases in to the crease pattern – wiggly lines in one corner were punishing and at the time I had no idea what were to be mountain and valley folds so just made sure they were good creases reasoning they would reverse effortlessly.

The collapse was much more complicated than I had anticipated – there was no simple way to it, they all needed to collapse simultaneously so I set about working out the lay of the creases – it became obvious which ones had to be mountains and valleys then it was a matter of reversing over half of them so they were bent in the right direction.

This, if I am honest took an age to complete – the wiggles in particular just fought me the whole time and their diagonal junction was also tough – the size of the sheet (being so large) made gripping it really difficult when working near the middle of the sheet and the layers became very dense really quickly.

Thankfully, I used a high GSM Kraft and it survived without giving way to paper fatigue (unlike the folder who threw it away multiple times in frustration).

In the end, after a little MC posing, we have an astonishing figurine – the Lady Aquarius arms, lovely hands, feet, robe, face and hair with her water pot, water cascading out in magical rivulets.

With a little bit of layer mashing she is free standing, almost 30cm tall and quite stunning. Good work to Sebastien Limet and Eric Vigier for correctly guessing that she was in fact Hojyo Takahashi’s masterpiece but I think I have added a little of my own character to her, given there are really few instructions on how to finish the model off, I found I had to improvise to make her robes and pose her.

Many people in my life were born under the Aquarius Star Sign – this little beauty will go to my Mother in Law Barbara, if she wants her.

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