box pleat

436: Sydney Opera House

| wonko

Anyone who knows me understands my fascination with the Sydney Opera House, as a kid I saw the sails of it being built:

Set magnificently on Bennelong Point right in the heart of the harbour, it together with the Sydney Harbour Bridge (no, do not panic, I am not making that) are quintessential Australian icons.

Googling one day I stumbled across a design idea from Gerwin Sturm (2007) for a box pleated version of my fav building on earth, and some vague explanations of how it “should be possible to collapse and shape based on a 32×32 grid”. Continue reading →

435: Satoshi’s Phoenix 3.5

| wonko

There are a number of models in the origami world I see as “legendary” – the Phoenix (version 3.5) is one of those:

When I bought Satoshi Kamiya’s works book volume 2 I knew I would one day put myself up against this challenge, I also knew it would take me a while to master it.

Continue reading →

407: Chan’s One-Sheet Rose

| wonko

Browsing Origami Tanteidan 12th Convention, I noticed a seemingly impossible fold:

Brian Chan is an amazing designer (Attack of the Kraken is one of his) and this flower is an ingenious, if intense, use fo a coloured square of paper.

If the paper was coloured green one side, red the other, then the way this design turns out the green bits of the flower and the red petals sort themselves out appropriately – amazing.

I only had some glossy red (a cheapo pack of coloured origami paper that loses colour all over your fingers) but persevered with it, despite the mess and the tiny size.

I still have to master the flower shaping, it sort of looks correct (and I have no doubt if i wet-folded or used methyl cellulose I could mould it more naturally , but I am happy I have got the hang of the fold. 

I used a 25cm red/white square and that is hard work – some of the accordion pleats are tiny, but it worked out ok. My second fold was a 45cm brown kraft fold that was easier to complete.

Interestingly, the box-pleating technique to raise the leaf is similar to the “dollar flower” I have been folding from the cut-offs from A3 squares, so found that part of the model really easy. The technique of raising the colour-changed petals for the rosebud is ingenius.

406: Zombie Uprising

| wonko

Trapped in a particularly uninteresting supervision (I am a teacher, sometimes we have to supervise other teacher’s classes), I began bending paper unsure what I was going to make.

First I fashioned a hand, devising some lovely slender (skeletal almost) hands and looked at the paper I had left and then it came ot me – zombie hand emerging from a grave.

After much experimentation on the tombstone mostly, abandoning a full cross (yes, I did successfully box pleat one but in the end it seemed unnecessarily fiddly for the concept) I settled on a simple headstone.

This is the second time, whilst doodling, a new model has emerged (the other being superdude) and I am quite chuffed with it.

If you KNOW what you are looking at, it is obvious: basic scenario of undead digging themselves out out the grave; but honestly I had some hilarious guesses from passers by who noticed I was folding and wondered what it was.

I have included the dev sequence in 2 parts (partly because I wanted to document it clearly enough so someone else could have a go at it and partly because I wanted to remember how I did it – the box-pleat on the tombstone is neat, but I have not yet come up with a scheme to eradicate the seam down it’s face.

This is a little early for Halloween, but would love someone else to have a go at folding this to see if the photsequence is stand-alone or needs extra annotation.

Any takers?

403: Lang’s Organist

| wonko

I was reading the chapter on “box pleating” in Robert Lang’s “Origami Design Secrets – 2nd Ed” (one of my cherished origami books) and came across the chapter “homework” which is this Organist seated at her Wurlitzer:

This model is astonishing for a bunch of reasons. The design is clever – one piece of paper to fashion the player and the instrument, the details of both the player and instrument are well controlled, efficiently use paper and are clearly recognisable.

I upscaled, starting with a 128x32cm piece of brown Kraft paper, used a tape measure to lay in the landmark creases (although I could have folded them, it would have resulted in much more disfiguring creases in the end model so I am glad I did). In retrospect, working much smaller would have been very difficult with my fat, clumsy fingers as some of the pleating becomes very fiddly indeed (32nds and 64ths)

Initially, working with paper on this scale is problematic – simple things like “fold in half” take on epic proportions and introduce inaccuracies which seem slight at the time but compound in such a convoluted model.

There was an “ahh” moment when the box that is the body of the organ swings into place, making the keyboards and footpedals slip into place that was very satisfying.

I enjoyed folding this model, probably will not fold it again, but learned a bit about paper properties and wrangling pleats that will make future folds better I think.

What to do with her? there is the question – the resultant model is quite large (16x14x14cm) and in some places one layer thick (others much more so), but it is stable and surprisingly strong. It even has a music stand atop the organ that even “Barry Morgan” would appreciate. Suggestions?