You find wisdom and counsel is the most unexpected of places, people can be wise beyond their years and offer you more support and encourage than they realise.
I was asked to fold an owl, simultaneously, for two completely different purposes. (1) A good mate wanted to give an Owl to someone who had helped him out with some well chosen words of wisdom. (2) During the World Origami Days event organised by MiniNeo, I was challenged to fold an Owl by Sebastien Limet. Continue reading
Sometimes we all need a little magic in our lives:
If anyone can get us past the Balrog and on beyond Mount Doom, Gandalf can.
Made from a square (and the scrap cut off to make it a square to make the staff) for a friend who, like all of us, is a valuable and important part of this world.
Browsing an amazing book by David Mitchell called “Paper Crystals”, I spotted an interesting modular ball based on pentagons tiled with triangles named Electra.
Coupled with the original model was a suggestion that it was possible to make a 60 module version consisting of pentagons surrounded by squares separated by triangles. Continue reading
Sometimes I just need to fold, it is difficult to explain but I find great clarity in wrestling with complex geometry. We ALL have much to learn GRASSHOPPER. 
Having bought Robert Lang’s “Origami Insects Volume 2” I thought it was high time to fold something from it.
Lang’s models are great technical exercises, amazing manipulations of the plane to the extraordiary.
I am also searching for a model to use a sheet of Origamido paper I have on, but will not use it as a first fold – it costs too much.
There is lots to like with this model, and it was a good WTF exercises – sadly my origami friends probably recognised it immediately and my other friends had no clue.
Fernando Gilgado is a legendary character folder, I have made many of his models, this one is a charmer:
from one sheet of paper, you get 6 pages, a hard cover, arms, legs, a smile and eyes peeping over the top – neat
So, as I mark furiously (having run out of the ability to put it off any longer), my procrastigami takes hold and I started bending something. I also wanted to try out my new self-healing craft mat (the green griddy thing) and have discovered that folding from an iPad or other tablet is better than a book because of the pinch-zooming possible to help old eyes see details of diagrams. Continue reading
When life gives you Chiyogami or hand-made Washi, with a relatively simple twist you can turn it into a hex-box: 
Lovely hand-printed Washi (swirls of fibres, block printed 20+ years ago) and modern Chiyogami (machine made but lovely) are actually fairly difficult to work with because you cannot see the creases and Fujimoto’s hex box establishes a bunch of landmarks to form the base-creases.
This is not a first fold, but the form and ingenious locking mechanism, slight variation to form lid and base make this one of my favourite folds – a jewel box when made from lovely paper.
Want one? Buy some nice paper (A3 or A4 work just fine, this is folded from a “golden rectangle”) and I will make it for you (or teach you how to make it yourself if you are near) – have your people call my people and we will make something beautiful together.
The link between a boy and his pet is a special one, even if the pet is a hermit crab named “Smee”
When I heard Sam had suffered the loss of Smee I remembered the pets I had also said goodbye to, tough gig indeed.
I remembered I had folded, as part of the 365 project, a hermit crab – never quite mastering the fold so was determined to re-attempt it (with a few more years skill under my belt) Continue reading
I was exploring a corrugation technique I last used with Eric Joisel’s Bandoneon and stumbled across a sort of plan to fold Joisel’s Snail:
You start with an extraordinarily long (my estimate – 3.25m) and narrow (in my model 9cm) strip of paper, then start folding slanted lines (using a 3:1 gradient) in both directions
You may remember I recently folded a Chuka Ryu, and it had a particular spiral bend to it…
… that spiral corresponds to the diameter of the white keep precisely – one sits inside the other.
This now tells a totally different story – what is happening here?
Add your narrative suggestions to the comments section.
In days of old, when people of a township were threatened they retreated (as their last best hope) into the Keep – a heavily fortified “core” of the castle that was designed to withstand the most vigorous of attacks
So I had this odd but interesting idea that it should, given the right size of paper, be possible to fold an entire castle from it. After being inspired by Gachepaper and his exploration of Lotka I decided to give it a whirl
I was given a beautiful sheet of Unryushi tissue by a friend. The arrangement (in case YOU want to take part also) is if you give me nice paper, I will make you something out of it.
I prepared the paper by Methyl Cellulosing it to a clean window:
This make it crisp and strong, then, in a dragony frame of mind, I used Tadashi Mori’s own folding tutorial to fold a Darkness Dragon 2.
I had already folded the Darkness Dragon 1, but this model was a refinement I had not tried. There is a killer collapse after some exacting pre-folding – a sort of all these folds happen at the same time whilst inside a bunch of others, but the sense of it makes for a lovely body.
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the starsThis 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.
In the olden days children, photographs were taken with a specialised piece of equipment, usually by a professional, using FILM:
In those days, you posed the shot, measured light levels, pulled focus and ensured the picture was worth taking before you wasted the plate – photography was expensive and much more of a science (some would also argue much moe of an art).
In the modern idiom, nearly every thing has a squillion megapixel camera, you point, shoot 60 frames, pick the least worst, apply a filter and upload it on Instagram and have your “friends” praise your artistry. Continue reading
I had a small but lovely piece of elephant-dung paper – now this is not as gross as it first sounds, the paper is cleaned fiber retrieved from elephant dung – yeah, ok, it does not sound any less grotty – lovely textured irregular and lumpy paper though it was:
I needed a model, Sebastien Limet’s Tarsier seemed most logical (given I had not folded it before and I thought folding it near life-size might be an interesting challenge).
There is much to love about this model – apart from the delicious expressiveness of the face, delicate grip of its primate hands or the prehensile grip of its tail, this is a real charmer.
I like that the face is implied, but I can see lovely big innocent eyes, sensitive ears and all the hallmarks of a delicate but mischievous “bush baby” which makes these little chaps endangered in the wild because rich folk sentence them to long agonizing deaths as pets outside of their native habitats. Continue reading
It is a little recognised fact that the animal that has killed the most people in Africa is in fact the Hippopotamus:
I stumbled across this delightful model while leafing through “African Animals in Origami” – a much worn volume when looking for something to try from my invalid chair.
I had a gold (more correctly bronze) foil square and was wanting to fold something “yoshizawa style” – free form hand-held rather than on table or other flat surface – the challenges with this style are accuracy and precision, the payoffs are often more fluid, softer curves and lively asymmetrical poses.
I like this model, although he reflective paper makes discerning details difficult – she has a wry grin, 2 lovely tusks on her bottom jaw, lovely ears and a fine rump after some 3d modelling.
