The Fitful Flog

There are several. Like, who has them and what they’re doing with them. Another issue is that they’re too small for complex folding and not easily available in all areas.

I was thinking about the fold I opened this site with, the Dollars to Doughnuts fold. If you are in, oh, I don’t know, the National University of Singapore or Omsk or the Faroes, maybe, you might not have lots of dollars on hand. Or maybe you have just a couple and you’d like to practice a bit on something first. Something big with the lines drawn on it, so you can see what you’re doing.

Behold the Big Bill Dollar to Doughnuts pdf. It’s way big, 2.4 MB. The bill is 10? inches by 4? inches (or 291.5 centiliters, for those of you using the système vichyssoise d’unités) and has the crease pattern in conventional dashes and dots emblazoned upon it. There’s still a dollar sized CP and a hints sheet, too.

We think that this reproduction of the dollar bill is legal, but it’s hard to say what’s legal anymore because the enforcement of laws is now in the hands of double minded men, unstable in all their ways.

From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it’s nothing but flowers

-Talking Heads

This is a compass rose. When I look at my visitor logs, I notice that I get a lot of traffic based on the fact that this site contains the words rose and origami frequently. That’s a little deceptive, since there are no representational roses here. There will be, someday.

This week, ATELIER Silver, a Japanese folder and blogger, folded the 8-Sided Compass Rose Jar and wondered, where’s the rose? Silver, if you fold the model from paper instead of foil and hold it up to the light, you will see this pattern in the bottom of the jar. Although I’ve been working with helical twists for some years, I borrowed this term from KASAHARA Kunihiko who speaks of compass folding in his book, Amazing Origami.

While we’re on the subject of my frequent abuse of metaphor, I’ll point out that when I speak of iris closure, I do not mean the iris flower, but the camera iris. Like this:

There’s something called iris folding or teabag folding, kind of a radial symmetry thingee that people use to decorate greeting cards. When I fold in the loose ends of these jars and boxes, I frequently use a method that is evocative of that kind of decoration.

Silver, I like your site very much. I was not only surprised and delighted to see one of my folds on a Japanese site, I was astounded to see it done in American foil on a Japanese site. American foil doesn’t look like anything else, does it?

One of those four-in-the-morning ideas – what if we graft an iris closure onto a Fujimoto cube? Wow – two great tastes that taste great together.

Here’s the CP and I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Yetch! What’s with the green lines? Blue for mountain, okay, red for valley, sure, but green?”

Relax – green is to show folds you make to mark the edges. Guidelines, as it were.

Catch you on the flipside.

But only briefly. When I posted about the Three Card Monte back in November, the Flog had maybe three readers and they were all, I think, Americans. Now we have a lot more and only 37% of you have regular access to good old 8½×11 inch American letter paper. (For the rest of you out there in A4 lands, welcome aboard and it’s not too late to reject the faux scientism of the vast Vichy Metric Conspiracy.Throw off your power-of-ten shackles! Freedom belongs to those who can count by twelves!)

Um, I had a point here, somewhere. Ah, yes. At the annual convention in New York City, one sees signs here and there, saying, “Don’t Get In Over Your Head!” Probably not a great way to learn how to swim, nor a particularly good way to learn how to fold. I admire those who jump into the complex side of the pool. It can be frustrating, I know, but not everyone wants to start out with duckies and sailboats.

Ce?i dit, sometimes an individual will see a complex model and want to fold that model, come Hell or high hamsters. Say a hapless folder were to post a CP, knowing that most experienced folders could puzzle it out in a few moments without any difficulty and this rugged, yet untutored, individualist comes along and sees it. It’s the old Immovable Object and Irresistible Force thing. Something’s got to give.

This morning, I fully intended to get up and make a full, from scratch SCP of how to fold the Three Card Monte, full of landmarks and angles and three-part harmony and all like that. But then my landlord came by with a big bag of smoke detectors and CO detectors and the day kind of got away from us.

Please to accept this humble set of photo instructions that will lead you step-by-step from the CP to a hexagonal shirt wallet, with my abject apologies for not explaining how it got here. And, if you feel cocky, you can try your hand at the playing card model.

And next time, I promise to post something from a square. Tschüs!

Which is pretty much exactly the same as the previous model, the 8-Sided Compass Rose Jar. The difference is that this one is made from American letter paper (and it could be any size rectangle, really) and that instead of using that ?2/2 section to make the closure, this one repeats that section over and over, until it makes eight helical spirals up the sides.

Well, it more suggests eight helical spirals than actually creates them. Try it out, you’ll see. This is just the CP, but if you’ve successfully folded the 8-Sided model, you’ll be able to puzzle this one out pretty quickly.

I’ll hasten to add that this model squirms uneasily beneath the heel of the conceptual tyranny of 22½°-45°-90° angles.

Drawing this CP put me very much in mind of the Tholian Web episode of Star Trek.

I’ve been doing some more complicated things – but I thought I probably ought to put out the simple version before getting all publicly jiggy with it. This one has an iris closure going to every second corner, a nice basket weave look. This is probably the easiest version of this model to learn, but it uses the same ideas that appear in the more complex versions. This one is made out of a square, but as I note in the SCP, you can make this from any size rectangle. Well, mostly. There are some limits.

The components of the fold is a helical twist down the middle and then an iris pattern on the top, to hold it together.

Good for holding paperclips, pencils, skittles, what have you.

The Sequenced CP.

Please note the cool little flags in the upper right corner. If you push on one, it will translate all this slang-ridden jargonese into bad French, worse German, tortured Portugese – whatever flavor you like. I doubt it will help with communication, but it may make you feel more at home.

Over half of the traffic for this site comes from non-English speaking nations. (Unless you count those counties south of the Tweed as an English speaking nation – then it’s slightly less than half.) That’s pretty wicked cool.

A neat plug-in – I got the idea from my buddy, Eric.

Purists sometimes look at our work and say, “Oh, how very special – do you ever fold anything from a square?”

The back of our hand to their froward ways. Purists!

Yeah, sometimes. We like rectangles. A square is a kind of rectangle, as we’ll sometimes remind them. We try not to get superstitious about Number, hard as that often is. There’s nothing particularly sacred about a ratio or counting system outside of its relationship to man – our math is on the via negativa. As Sam Cooke put it so well, “Don’t know much about Algebra, Don’t know what a slide rule is for….” The things we don’t know are way more important than the ones we think we know.

Well, this is from a square. And after you fold one, you’ll realize you could make this from any size rectangle. Feel free, this piece is itching for variation.

And we have some more ?-quiddity, here. The folding sequence in steps 1-5 of the SCP, the one by which we approach a 54° angle, is reverentially lifted from Kunihiko Kasahara’s Amazing Origami. The cherry blossoms on the model above are a visual pun on the ?-love inherent in the piece.

This model is sent into the world under a Creative Commons license, one that allows you to copy and distribute the Crease Pattern and the Sequenced Crease Pattern, teach it to the teaming masses at your door, and to modify it and develop it as you think interesting or desirable. It does not allow for economic development without making the appropriate offerings of respect to the Family. (Someday, we will tell you the sad, yet instructional tale of the purveyor of ebooks and the Origolem.)

The files:

American Letter CP

A4 CP

Sequenced CP and Photo Diagram

Okay, I had blog envy. Everyone else was so Web 2.0 and I was all humdrumbloggery, well, it got a little embarrassing.

Of course, now I have to pretend I understand what all these bells and whistles do. Already found the Blows-Everything-Up button. Pressed it twice.

If you subscribe, I put a forward on the old feed, but that might make your aggregator a bit ferklempt – try this instead.

New content coming soon.

A Mister Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey writes in to say, “Hey, what’s the deal with the Puff Stars? How do I fold a Puff Star? Does CP stand for something? How will I know if I have folded a Puff Star or something else? What’s a perf strip? Will folding Puff Stars have a positive or negative effect on global warming?”

You sure ask a lot of questions for someone from New Jersey.

But it does raise a valid point. Posting pictures of complex models with CPs that only a few people could understand would seem to undercut the appearance of my missionary zeal for Open Source Origami. I was delighted when Mawelucky folded a Puff Star, but she is clearly an advanced folder of great intuition. I’m not sure I could collapse that Puff Star CP without some guidance. We need to democratize the CPs.

Knowing myself to be a most dilatory and inefficient diagrammer, I have made shift to combine two different techniques of documenting the fold, hoping to spread the astral puffery on the gestalt. Might happen, you don’t know. I stomped and stomped on the graphics until I got a PDF of reasonable size, 369 KB. The arrows – surely, the lamest arrows, ever – are embedded soft fonts. We hope so, anyway. If you see dancing lizards or happy faces instead of arrows, please let me know.

The only thing I don’t do, is show you how to make a regular decagon. The method of making one from a square is not difficult, but may not be universally known. But I’ve already kind of fried my diagramming circuitry. Here’s a PDF of just a decagon. Choose Fit to Page in the print dialog. Should work on any size paper.

CP for American letter paper.
CP for A4.
(These are the files I posted in October – just so you wouldn’t need to go looking for them.)

Here’s the new file, the Sequenced CP and Photo Diagram.