(If the pictures are too large for your monitor, or you have a really slow connection, please go here instead.)
| Dragon Diagram by Julia Niemeyer | 2007-12-01 |
| Copper-mesh Horse | 2007-04-22 |
| Flying Unicorn in stainless mesh | 2007-04-22 |
| Flying Unicorn | 2007-01-27 |
| KNL Dragon | 2007-01-14 |
| Leaping Guitarist | 2007-01-14 |
| Red Fox | 2007-01-14 |
| Dancing Shiva | 2007-01-14 |
| Beaver | 2007-01-14 |
| Stainless Steel Origami (on a separate page) | 2006-10-07 |
| Mega-Stego (on a separate page) | 2006-07-07 |
| older stuff | older |
One square of commercial 150-mm origami paper, no cuts. This was the
first design of my own that I was reasonably pleased with. I was
making a Montroll tyrannosaurus one day, and it occurred to me that if
I rabbit-eared all four points of a bird base, I could get
eight points... from there it was only a little bit more tweaking to
come up with this. This little guy is about two inches tall.
One 30-inch square of commercial project/banner paper, no cuts. I stole the
head from Sensei Lang's KNL Dragon and glued it
onto my flying horse. The result was not quite what I was expecting, I was
just aiming for a better-defined head, but I think it's very pleasing
nonetheless! Papa a flying horse, and Mama a unicorn... a pretty fine
pedigree! This little stallion is about eight inches tall. He'd look pretty
impressive in stainless steel... I'll have to see if I can get that to
work. I think I'll diagram this one... check back in a while.
One 150-mm square
of commercial origami paper, no cuts. OK, so the peas are a little
blocky... a friend says that indicates they're genetically-modified
peas. (See, I'm an applied mathematician, and I engineered them this
way so that they can be eaten without honey1
:-) ) It's
basically a set of pleat-folded small boxes, the peas, set along one
diagonal of the paper; then the rest of the paper is just shaped more
or less free-form around the peas. After I got the pod to shape, I
clamped it with two binder clips and some grocery-store twist-ties,
then dunked it in water for about ten seconds, and finally let it dry
for a day. If that's not done, it's very difficult to get the
peapod to hold its shape.
If you try this, don't use paper that's too big. After making the first one of these, I tried with a sheet of 350-mm paper, thinking the larger size would make forming the peas easier... a total disaster! I couldn't get my hands around the paper to do the pleats.
Here are instructions for the peapod (PDF, about 1.4 MB).
1 "I eat my peas with honey, I've done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on the knife!" -- Anon.
Here is another peapod in progress. This started out as a rectangle, about 5 inches by 13 inches. Following several people's suggestions, I'm going to try wet-shaping the peas to make them more rounded before I proceed with the outside of the peapod.
And here's the finished result, plus another peapod. I wet-shaped the yellow peas over a rounded dowel before shaping the pod; for the green peapod, I just shaped the peas dry over the dowel. It seemed to work about as well as the wet-shaping did.
If you're offended by naughty stuff, don't go here... I don't think it's very naughty, though.
Same warning as the previous item... also in the naughty section.
Two squares of commercial origami paper, one cut. This was pretty directly inspired by some of the stuff in Jeremy Shafer's Origami to Astonish and Amuse, in particular the star of David. The concept is really very simple: make a highly-pleated waterbomb base to form an 'X', then fold two of the arms of the 'X' to form the loops. The cut, alas, was not made by this pair of scissors, but by a set of FiskarsTM scissors...
Here is a set of diagrams for the scissors. (PDF, about 385 KB)
NOTE: I lied in the previous version of these instructions! I mis-remembered what I had done, and claimed that I had pleated into 32nds, which was a mistake; it was actually 16ths... very sorry!
Here's another version of the scissors -- again, one square, no cuts. My real scissors have a plastic handle and metal blades, so I thought I'd try to duplicate that color change. The white along the lower handle is a folding imperfection, not intentional. I don't have these diagrammed... I'll try to do that at some point. It's a pretty straightforward but somewhat fussy modification of the basic scissors above.
One square of commercial origami paper, no cuts. Yesterday (Oct 24, 2005) was world origami day, so I made an emoticon: a smiley :-) except you don't have to tilt your head to view this one! This is another application of the basic move I used in the peapod. In principle, I could make a chessboard this way... I think.
One 30-inch
square of commercial packing paper, no cuts. This design is by
Robert Lang, from Origami Insects and their Kin.
One 30-inch
square of commercial gift-wrapping, no cuts. This is the same design
as the previous model. Somebody suggested that I make the scorpion out
of thinner paper, and I said that I had done so, but it looked a
little odd to have a christmas-star scorpion... well, there it is!
One 30-inch square of commercial packing paper, no cuts. This design
is by John Montroll, from Prehistoric Origami. I think this
is one of my favorite designs... I must have made a dozen of these by
now (they make great presents!)
One 14-inch square of handmade paper with tobacco-leaf pieces, one 53-inch
square of photographic backdrop paper. The large stegosaur is about 27 inches
from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. Folding this large one was
rather aerobic... full-contact origami!
The backdrop paper is not two-colored; to make the eyes, I did the first part of the folding, then glued in pieces of pink paper in the appropriate places once I knew where the eyes would be.
Photographic backdrop paper is very stiff, more like thin cardboard than paper really. That makes folding a little harder; on the other hand, in this size, it means the model doesn't end up completely floppy. If you try this (or even larger), I'd suggest practicing in 30-inch Kraft packing paper first (above); I found that making those stegosaurs turned out to be really excellent practice for this big one, and this big one will no doubt be good practice for making one out of ten-foot paper...
Yes, it was good practice; well, it ended up being nine-foot paper rather than ten, but here is a separate page showing how I made a mega-stegosaur that ends up being about 55 inches from nose to tail.
One 30-inch
square of commercial packing paper, no cuts. This design is also by
John Montroll, from Prehistoric Origami.
One square, no cuts. I made this model a long time ago... 14
years? I don't remember the size of the paper; I think about 12 to 15 inches.
It came from a specialty paper dealer in London, UK. This design is also
by John Montroll, from Animal Origami for the Enthusiast.
One square, no cuts. I made this model a year or so ago. This design is also
by John Montroll, from A Constellation of Origami Polyhedra.
40 squares, no cuts. This is the traditional Japanese crane. These are
destined for Longwood Gardens
in Kennett Square, PA; they are doing origami exhibitions as part of their
Chrysanthemum Festival this fall.
3 squares of copper mesh, the large one 9", the other two 6". This was
just a doodle, my wife had a piece of scrap copper mesh lying around,
and I picked it up and started folding it. That worked well enough
that I made a couple more. This material is very different than paper;
in paper, if you make a crease, it weakens the paper at that spot. In
copper (and most? other metals), the crease causes the material to
work-harden at that spot, so it's much trickier to reverse creases. On
the other hand, it's possible to burnish away the creases much more
effectively than in paper (as long as you haven't work-hardened the
material so much that it cracks). For these cranes, the un-bone-folder
below really came in handy; I was hesitant to use my real bone folder
on the copper mesh, but the steel un-bone-folder wasn't going to be
harmed by the copper. The other end also came in handy as a hammer for
forging the beak... not a technique that's usually used in
origami!
One square, no cuts. This design is another Montroll, also from Animal
Origami for the Enthusiast. I guess I like his designs!
One square, no cuts. This design is yet another Montroll, also from Animal
Origami for the Enthusiast.
One square, no cuts. This design is from Montroll's Mythological
Creatures and the Chinese Zodiac in Origami.
One 30" square of commercial "poster paper", no cuts.
This design is from Lang's Origami Design Secrets.
I finished this model yesterday.
One 30" square of commercial "poster paper", no cuts.
This design is from Marc Kirschenbaum's Paper in Harmony.
I finished this one about two weeks ago.
One 15" square of commercial origami paper, no cuts. This is another
Montroll, from one of his earlier books, I forget now which one (and
they're still packed, so I can't easily look, sorry). I finished this
model sometime last summer.
One 30" square of commercial packing paper, no cuts. This is another
Lang design, from the compilation Origami Today, Mythical
Beings by Jay Ansill. I did this model about a year ago.
Although the models in this book are lovely, I can't recommend the book or the later version by the same author; the diagrams are pretty bad, with multiple mistakes in every model I've tried so far.
This is another
Lang design... actually, this one is the one that started it all for
me: a looong time ago, in some volume of the Caltech alumni
newsletter I think it was, there was a small article on or by Sensei
Lang and talking about origami, and this brown piece of paper was
included, along with instructions on how to fold this beaver (it being
the Caltech mascot). I folded it, and was hooked. That's when I
started collecting origami books and folding in a serious way.
I don't know how big the paper was originally, but this model is about
four inches tall.
A few weeks ago, I took an intro to blacksmithing workshop at
Old Sturbridge Village in central
Massachusetts. One of the things we learned how to do was to make a
"penny scroll" at the end of a piece of steel. I made one, and then
decided that I could turn this into an origami tool: a bone folder. So
it's not really bone... I don't think the paper will care!
If you'd like to comment, please feel free to contact me at korg@korgwal.com. I would be grateful for any indication of how complex you think these models are.
Enjoy! -- Uwe Hollerbach
Page last modified at 2007/12/01 20:15 US/Pacific time