Yoshizawa Mouse Survey
- Posted by admin at 07:55:45 // //
Created by: YOSHIZAWA Akira
Published in: various publications (see details)
Why: Someone asked on the O-list about any mice by Akira Yoshizawa that had four legs. Having folded a couple of Yoshizawa mice that I liked a lot (and taught one, with permission, at an OrigamiUSA convention a number of years ago), I thought I’d do a survey of the Yoshizawa mice that I could find, and here they are.
Starting at the lower right and going counter-clockwise around the image, they are:
from Inochi Yutaka na Origami (Origami Full of Life) (mouse 1)
from Sosaku Origami (Creative Origami) (mouse 2)
from Oru 11 (mouse 3 and mouse 4)
from Oru 11, OrigamiUSA Annual Collection 2000, Akira Yoshizawa ORIGAMI (Exhibition Catalog), Paperart: The Art of Sculpting with Paper, Origami Hakubutsushi 1 (Origami Museum 1), Origami Museum I: Animals (mouse 5)
My favorite: Mouse 2 from “Sosaku Origami”. Mouse 1 from “Inochi…” was a very close second. I was less enthusiastic about the various actual-legged ones.
And the ubiquitous mouse - the one in 6 of the books - is also pretty nice, but definitely works best from wetfolded, thicker paper, or at least softer sheet (e.g. handmade paper or washi), dry folded. And it is incredibly sensitive to the angles you choose when folding the head (there’s some leeway in an early fold that, in typical Yoshizawa-model fashion, has profound effects on the later geometry…)
All the models benefit from folding them multiple times as you start to internalize the proportions, and all work well wet-folded as well!
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The intersection of origami and welding (sort of)
- Posted by admin at 12:30:12 // //
Never quite got this uploaded last spring when I built it, and with the blog re-hashing the photo was languishing on my disk… But some of my friends asked me whether it was possible to combine my two hobbies, and here’s one of my answers to the question. :)
The shape is called the Great Dodecahedron. It’s brazed together (like soldering, but with brass rod for solder, and a high-temperature torch for heat), and each triangular piece (there are 60) was cut by hand with an oxy-acetylene cutting torch.
I love the contrast of the rough torch-cut pieces and the complex mathematical shape. Can’t wait to do some more of these!
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US Dollar Animals
- Posted by admin at 15:16:14 // //
My mom was leaving on a cruise, and wanted to be able to leave origami as tips. I got the fun of folding the stuff into an assortment of creatures and things! (The hyper-observant of you will note that they are $5s, not $1s, but of course the proportions are the same.)
From left to right:
Shirt (Fukumoto) Swan (Montroll) Fish (Montroll) Parrot (Montroll) Kimono (traditional) T-Rex (Montroll) Cat (Diaz) Teddy Bear (Fukumoto) Butterfly (Fukumoto) Rabbit (Joyce)
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*cough* *bang* *clatter-of-dropped-tools*
- Posted by admin at 16:33:49 // //
Sorry ‘bout this, but I’m in the midst of trying to get the blog rebuilt with a new system that won’t crash the server (sigh) and things are a bit of a mess at the moment. Please do consider coming back sometime in the next week or so, and I oughta have the content back in place!
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Yenn’s “1/6th of a cube,” revisited
- Posted by admin at 16:22:40 // //
Ok. So here’s the 1/6th of a cube, assembled. It consists of 3 each of right- and left-handed units, fitted together appropriately.
There was something darned difficult (for me) about visualizing this - I had to actually make the pieces and then look at them before I could convince my brain that they would go together into a cube! (This may relate to my trouble with visualizing cuboctahedral symmetry, too - something about the square and cube diagonals is hard for me to picture, go figure. Must go spend more time with my green Zome pieces!)
In the first small picture, you’re seeing two (one each of the left- and right-handed) modules. The long diagonal across the photo is going to end up being the corner-to-far-corner cube diagonal. The two edges at the bottom are the sides of the cube, and the diagonal kind of heading towards the viewer is the diagonal of one face of the cube. (Confused yet?)
The second small shot is of all three pairs of left- and right-handed units. We’ve got all we need, now, to build the cube.
The third small shot is of four pieces together; we’re looking down the long axis diagonally across the cube.
And the final shot is another view of all six pieces together. You can compare it and the large shot to see two sides of the cube.
Hope that makes the assembly clear! Oh, and I should note that it does not stay together, the pieces just slide off each other - for the photos, I cheated, and used double-sided sticky tape!
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