When someone speaks Portugese to me, I either feed it through Google (which unfortunately uses a Martian dialect of English) or ask my friend, Rosa, who grew up in Portugal and gives me recipes for febras. This time, though, I’m going to rely on eight weeks of accelerated Latin and guess you’re asking, “How the hell do you do this?” Or you’re insulting my uncle.

Okay, it’s not easy and it defies conventional and uncoventional diagramming. Jane (who does speak Portugese, by the way) succeeded in folding it, I’m not sure how. If you look at the Star Vase diagrams, you’ll see a single twist of a pentagonal tube offsets the bottom half. However, it you twist it twice, you line the halves up again. It leaves corners sticking out that need to be folded in. It’s not wicked easy to collapse.

In many ways, this was a transitional piece and I hope to publish more transparent variations of this soon.

Doing your origami is a bit like both – I have “instructions” (you do leave a lot of clues on your entries) and I have to put things together so it works.

A friend of mine saw the photo of the one I did and when he found out it’s made from a golden rectangle, he said he had to do it (he’s a math professor).

It uses the same grid as the star-vase. Instead of two full twists in one direction (as above), I used two half-twists in opposite directions. You end up with the corners of the tube aligned and five inside reverse folds. This uses less paper, but is a little tricky to initiate. I’ll have to do it a few more times before I can attempt a CP.

I’ve got to say, it’s impressive how you can decipher these cryptic CPs so well.