I’m down to the last 6 Hans Werner Guth wooden folding tools, buy now while stocks last. I hope Hans will find time to make a few more, but don’t delay!
Category Archives: techniques
Wooden folding tools?
I’m now the sole retailer of wooden folding tools from Hans Werner Guth in the known universe. Read more here!
Mattias Jones
I went for a hot choccy in the lovely Cafe#9 in Sheffield and saw some advanced origami tesselations lying around. I asked who made them – “that guy sat outside”! So I met Matt Jones, a local artist who is obsessed with shapes and patterns. He spoke eloquently about shapes in paper and I hope he may share his thoughts with the BOS at some point.
Here’s a video where he talks about his work. His site is www.madebyjones.com
Come on baby light my fold
Sue’s flapper
For many years I’ve been struggling to produce consistently good photographs of origami. Despite having a decent camera (Canon EOS400d) the lighting has always been a problem. Inspired by some wonderful photos by Rebecca Harris, I got in touch with her to pick her brains.
Amongst other useful information, she sent me to a site explaining how to make your own lightbox. I had the required materials lying around, so knocked one up. The results were instantly a great deal better. I need some sidelights to help knock out the remaining shadow, but it’s looking good!
The origami tool you can use and yet retain your credibility!
Envelopeners have been with us for some time now and despite some reservations, have slowly worked their way into the “essential equipment” list for many paper-folders. You can use them just as easily with A0 paper as with smaller squares and it’s almost impossible to injure yourself using them..
They do have a tendency not to work every time, but a 90% success rate is good enough for me. During classes I wear mine around my neck – an origami dog tag perhaps and it’s a great conversational item as well as almost magical (when it works).
My current favoured opener-of-choice is neither the Versnick, nor the BOS branded version, but that obtained from Viereck-Verlag, with the world’s most stylish neck band, created for the Träume Aus Händen exhibition organised by the Origami Galerie. You can buy these here for a solitary euro.
I’m sure there are people out there collecting these devices – anyone brave enough to admit it?
Good Moves #2 : the Norminton Lock
When I was a younger folder (in my late 20s) I was lucky that the mini-meeting near enough to attend regularly was the north-west meeting, held in Bramhall, near Stockport. At these meetings were regulars Wayne Brown, Dave Brill, David Petty and Ted Norminton, all highly creative and (mostly) intelligent origami designers.
Month by month, I saw the fruits of their labours, many unveiled for the first time – classics such as Norminton’s “Daffodil”, Brill’s “Nut & Bolt” and many more. This meant I was exposed to a barrage of exciting new techniques, one of which formed a central part of Ted’s “Seagull” holding both the body and the wings together. This was christened (probably by Brilly) “Norminton’s Lock”.
The concept is simple, but the execution utterly new and yet seemingly obvious, once you’d seen it. I’ve incorporated it into a few of my own designs and I recommend you fold it and (hopefully) admire it!
Folding a hexagon
Something about actual folding today, for a change! Here’s a neat method of producing a hexagon shown to me by Ian Harrison. It’s logical, elegant and shows minimal creases on the finished result. Clearly you can unfold and remove the extraneous paper.
CP challenge 2 : flower form 2
Here’s something slightly more challenging, a flower form. You’ll guess that some twisting is required and the crease that allows this has a defined and easily spotted location point. It’s also locked into shape. Out of interest, this “vital” crease can be altered to provide flowers that are more open.
Once you’ve identified the location for the shorter crease, you can use a template then reduce the length of the book folds to produce a neater CP. My mentor Wayne reckons this will work as a modular with a little tweaking, but I haven’t found a really stable form yet. Either that or I’m just to clumsy to assemble them. My money is on the latter!
Update
The esteemed David Lister writes to BOSmail (in reference to my boat CP) “It is now acceptable to distinguish mountain and valley folds in crease patterns with differently coloured lines such as red and blue. Were your original diagrams coloured?”.
The answer is no, because I thought it simple enough, but perhaps for this flower, it might be a good idea, plus it’s all good practise!
In creating said coloured lines, I realised I’d been over-complicating the design to no good purpose. Originally, a pinch-mark provided the location and the book folds didn’t extend further then was necessary, but in for a pinch, in for a pound. So here’s a revision, almost indistinguishable when folded, but much cleaner crease-wise.
CP challenge : Iso Area Boat
I have to confess to be largely untroubled by the appeal of crease patterns, but of late have actually been trying a few and finding them curiously stimulating! I feel this is not simply due to the intellectual challenge, but because a central part of my creative process is the sequencing of a model. Basically, when I create, it’s largely intuitive and experimental.
When a completed design emerges, I then need to discover a “good” folding sequence. This should be elegant, satisfying, efficient and above all, teachable. This part of the process involves a great deal of folding/unfolding, looking at how the creases combine and in what order. In essense, the same way I approach a crease patttern challenge.
Needless to say, my simple efforts are not going to cause many sleepless nights to Mr Lang, but perhaps for someone new to CPs, this may give you a toe in the door. Remember, a “good” sequence puts the right creases in the right orientation, so don’t just get a result, work on the folding sequence as well. This will have a bonus result of you learning the model very effectively.
The model itself is a simple sailboat, which happens to be “iso-area” (in its most primitive form!) – one side will be white, the other coloured. It is also “pureland” – only valley or mountain creases required.
Pureland #1 – reversing
John Smith created the concept of Pureland folding back in the mid 70s (read more on his website). Essentially, it suggests you can create models that are easy to teach if you only use valley and mountain folds – no sinks, reverses, squashes etc.
I’ve often thought this is a concept with many unexplored possibilities – here’s an example of how this can inspire new approaches to folding, in this case making a reverse fold by manipulating “hidden” layers. I’ll be exploring pureland more over the coming weeks…
