Anne's Origami Blog

US Dollar Animals

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*

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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Planned Teaching at OrigamiUSA 2009: Joisel “Penguin,” LaFosse “Butterfly”

So, the OrigamiUSA 2009 NY convention is fast approaching (yay!) and I’m planning on teaching two models.

The first, “3D Manchot” (3D Penguin) is by Eric Joisel who graciously sent me the instructions for this one when I whined in email that I didn’t have any great ideas for teaching this year. (Thanks, Eric!) It’s a fabulous model, with a perfectly organized color change, a really cool set of moves to get the head and belly formations, graceful lines… everything you’d expect from a Joisel fold. It is, also, perhaps the ultimate in open-backed models, with no apology for same - it’s kind of detailed and abstract at the same time. I’m really looking forward to teaching it.

The second, a new LaFosse butterfly - specifically, “Anne LaVin’s Butterfly” - was, yes, created for me! Michael was noodling around with butterfly designs, and came up with this one, and thought I would like it. Indeed I do!

In the photo are three samples of it - one (black and orange) folded from Origamido paper; one (white and purple) from regular origami paper; and one (multicolor) folded from duo “Harmony” paper. It works really well, in other words, from just about anything! I may have some duo handmade stuff for the class, not sure yet; we’ll definitely do it from plain paper and also from the “Harmony” stuff, though. You get the get the spot on the wings via this funky alternating set of angled folds, it’s very clever. And of course it’s using Michael’s infinitely flexible butterfly base. Also can’t wait to teach this one!

Now if I can just manage to get them both memorized… Don’t know why, but I rarely memorize pieces. Somehow, the part of my brain that does so just tends to shut off while I fold; I have to consciously try to pay attention, or when I’m done, I have very little recollection of what I just did. Odd but true…

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Chapman-Bell’s version of “Claudine’s Tato”

While wandering the web (Facebook -> Flickr and meandering from there, I think it was) I found this neat tato in Philip Chapman-Bell’s Flickr photostream.  The original is by Claudine Pisale, who gave it to Philip when he was in Italy.

I folded my first version from a printed-out crease pattern, and it folded together perfectly, with all the edges inside the main square; when I folded it a second time (using Philip’s folding method diagrammed at Flickr) clearly some small errors crept in - entirely my fault, I’m sure, not the foldng method! - and the flaps stuck out a bit at the sides.  Which is also kind of cool-looking.

It’s a beautiful fold, and the overlapping bits are just mind-boggling in the way they interleave.

And Philip also built this into a funky 3D box with curved creases, with the tato fold for a top/closure.  Cool!

(See all the related pix here at Flickr)

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Hudson’s “Heptagonal Flower Twist”

Andrew Hudson posted this over at Origami Weekly, and it looked like fun.  (How many times have you folded anything with heptagonal symmetry, anyway?)

Nicely diagrammed, easy to fold, and it looks great folded out of vellum.

Andrew’s backlit photo looked pretty cool, so I tried to do one myself, here.  Tricky to get the lighting to work, but it sure brings out the nifty look of all the layers.

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