The Time-Honored Art of Tongue Paper Folding

and all that in little over a minute.

Fold a 3D Omega Star!

Devised by origami artist John Montroll.

Made from a single sheet of square paper.  Not a perfect 3D star though as there'll be an unjoined part with a gaping hole,  but considering you made a 3D star with just one paper, it's still ingenious as hell.

If you want something more compact, you can also do the Omega Star using 6 modular units-- using 6 square sheets of paper.  Laborious but neater.

Here you go:

It's Horse-Folding Time

Pegasus, by Satoshi Kamiya

Pegaso, by Anibal Voyer

Make a Toy Out of Urban Paper

If you like tinkering with paper but don't have the patience for the rigors of origami, there's paper toys.  This book, Urban Paper by Matt Hawkins, in particular has ready-to-cut patterns (26 all in all) for amazing designer toys, and a DVD to boot.  The DVD includes both finished and blank templates, a tutorial, interviews with the toy designers, and 33 bonus templates).

(At Amazon, Urban Paper sells for just $14.  Get it here.)

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Sure, paper toys have got none of origami's purist only-from-a-single-sheet-of-square-paper quality, but designing and structuring these nifty paper models can be a real challenge.  

And while some origamists are wary about publicly distributing their diagrams as if their precious models were a closely-guarded secret, paper toymakers seem bent on the opposite: disseminate everywhere is the motto.

Which is why you can easily download the patterns (think the dotted line drawings you cut out of the back of cereal and pretzel boxes) and print them on good sturdy paper.  With just a few snips of the scissors here and there, some folds where indicated, and a dollop of glue to keep the thing together, you get something crazy like this:

Whimsical, cartoonish, and unapologetically fun, these pop-art -inspired paper toys are bold lines and colors and demeanor all throughout.   

Let's Have A(n Origami) Ball!

Thanks to one Mitsonobu Sonobe, there is such a wonderful thing in the world as a sonobe unit--a parallelogram (such as below)


which you fold from a piece of square paper and which you combine with other sonobe units to build something like this:

Pentakis dodecahedron: requires 30 modules

Or if you have lots of time in your hands, and are up to the challenge, something like this:

A whopping 270-unit sonobe ball

Obviously, the more sonobe units, the more-faceted ball you end up with.  Three modules give you, well, a basic pyramid called Toshie's Jewel (named after Toshie Takahama), while lots and lots of the modules will give you something grand, not to mention a headache.

This sonobe ball of mine is a modestly-sized project: just 12 units, not too few you get bored easily, and not too many you feel overwhelmed by fiber.  I've had this for three years now--taught to me by my then 9 year old cousin.  I prefer using cardboard for the modules for a sturdier ball you can throw around anytime.

 How to fold the sonobe unit?

Sonobesan is not the only guy responsible for modular units.  Check out Robert Neale's and Tomoko Fuse's works too.  This module, for instance, creates a more stellated dodecahedron.

It's OK to Fold a Butterfly

Something to do while you wait at the bank, at the doctor's office, or the dentist: fold a butterfly origami.

Apparently, origami diagrams are considered intellectual property and are protected by copyright laws.  Kinda like a trade secret.  The origamist took it upon himself figuring out the correct sequence of folds and what kind, and so he/she gets all the rights to the creation. 

It's therefore illegal to download origami diagrams not officially released by the authors themselves.  There's also an issue about selling an origami model.  On origami forums, people debate whether they can sell an origami model they laboriously folded for hours, say a koi fish complete with scales, using origami paper they bought, but whose blueprint they just borrowed from an original author.  Some say you can't make profit from something someone else had painstakingly engineered.  Some say go right ahead.



Should you feel the urge to show the world that you've successfully figured out how to fold Robert Lang's Housefly or Satoshi Kamiya's Samurai Helmet Beetle through a video tutorial, no matter how good your intentions are, that's not allowed too.  So the rule of thumb is just permission from the authors.




Back to the butterfly.  Here's Michael LaFosse anyway, an American origamist teaching us how to fold an Alexander Swallowtail butterfly himself.

Cardboard Kid Chairs, Anyone?

Rip + Tatter Cardboard Chair

Bet your Jollibee and McDonalds won't be having booster kid chairs like this anytime soon.  

The Rip + Tatter cardboard chairs (by furniture designer Pete Olyer), made from hammered out non-toxic, completely-recyclable industrial cardboard.  Who said kids can't be eco-friendly too?

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And now for something personal and boring.

When we were kids my dad took my sister and I to a factory that made Monobloc chairs, back when Monobloc was not yet a byword.  Okay, they might have simply been plastic kiddie chairs, but I was 8, give me a break.

Anyway, Daddy bought us four kiddie chairs, with laminated cartoon drawings on the lap.  Four chairs--one for us each, and two more to seat our cousin-friends, because 2 kiddie chairs just for us two would have been selfish, and not fun at all.  For a table, we had a wooden folding one, painted dark classic brown, a la picnic style.

I don't know where those shrimpy chairs are now, and what the drawings on them looked like (over time, the laminated drawings tended to warp).  I forgot how the factory looked like too.  But I remember the countless tea parties and birthday feasts we conducted right on that table and those plastic chairs.

We had a stingy Ilocano dad; we were the type of kids who didn't go to malls that often; instead we went straight to the factory, where it all began.  Not many kids had that.

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Wired had also featured a DIY cardboard kid chair product, touting it as a chair without packaging, or a packaging without a chair.

Who Knew Pop Up Books Can Be Like This?

It's never just a pop up book, at least not to paper engineer Robert Sabuda.  

Robert Sabuda's Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Sharks

We've all seen a pop-up book before, and chances are you pull a tab and something interesting pops up.  Simple.  

In the pop up books of Robert Sabuda however (along with his colleague Matthew Reinhart), you open the page and many events happen all at once.  The page literally bursts open and becomes alive, whether it's Alice chased by a flurry of playing cards in Wonderland, or a dinosaur with dangerous mouth and claws.  (Sure, the books in Harry Potter's world are more alive, but for now, we have Robert Sabuda to wow us.)

That's to say Sabuda's target audience isn't babies and toddlers (although who's stopping them from getting awed by this lovely cacophony on paper?)  If for a toddler, your regular plain old pop up book is already eye candy, think about the neurological and aesthetic implications Sabuda's technological marvels can do to a grown up person.  All that pivots and tabs and rich colorful illustrations and the threshold of paper exceeded.  Absolute genius.

(Note: You never buy a used pop up book.  Some of the pages will refuse to, well... pop.)

Anyway, people wage war with each other, invent missiles, etc.  And then there are those who take it upon themselves to engineer a piece of paper, and everyone comes out of it a winner.

Jada's DIY Paper Dolls | This Used to Be My Childhood Toy #1

(to the tune of Madonna's This Used to be My Playground.  Kidding)

Thankfully, my good friend Jada can be easily wheedled inspired at a moment's notice to talk about her favorite childhood toy. ;)

"Hmmm.. I was into paper dolls then. I love those paper dolls that you can

buy at your suking sari-sari store. I have a special love for those dolls with black stand :)

But in cases where i ran out of money to buy such--my scissors, used paper and crayons always saved my day. I could always create my home-made paper dolls. Aww, i miss those already."

So true.  Back then, it's us and our creativity and imagination.  Now those online paper dolls by Zwinky are doing the imagining for us.

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Image above, sent by Jada.  We would have preferred a pic of Jada herself with the said paper dolls of her childhood, but that was years ago and you know paper.

Thanks much anyway, Jada!