Yesterday, on the way home, I ran into Wendy, who was sitting on the sidewalk, begging. To be fair, it’s not something she does often. But such sights always throw me into ethical conniptions. Do you give them money, do you not give them money, do you give money to a third party…it doesn’t matter. By the time you’re on the sidewalk, you’ve effectively removed yourself from the possibility of any real help from anyone. Such a drag. But I can’t just go home. Even though she can’t remember it, Wendy and I were roommates, twenty-odd years back. Fate would surely kick my ass for walking on by. And there are worse things than Fate.

I think about it and go and buy some food that I remember her eating: tuna, celery, bread, mayonnaise, some ramen noodles. (Yeah, we always thought diet might have been part of the problem.) I circle the block and she’s still there, sitting behind a box, labeled “Money for Food.” I say hey and drop the bag with the groceries into the box and Wendy gets this puss on, a face of immense annoyance and offended pride. Man, that took me back.

Of course, Fate cannot be fooled by gestures. But I can be.

Two crease patterns: one with landmarks for those who enjoy working it out for themselves and one without for those who just want to get to it.

We’re back from the Convention in New York and our head is still spinning a bit, but not so’s you’d notice. We can report that a good time was had by all and that Mélisande*’s and my class on Monday went very well, indeed. Tato boxes were the topic of the day and it was a sell-out crowd — an enthusiastic crowd, methought, as well.

Since the spinning continues, a twist fold seems in order and as it’s Independence Day, a star-shaped model is not inappropriate. This is from a decagon, though I think it could be easily adapted to a pentagon or a circle, and is very much a tato — a tato marked by manifest inutility, no doubt, but a tato, nevertheless. It’s called Falling Star Tato, since the purse section is so small that it could not contain much more than a wish.

Here is a crease pattern and the same in postscript and some general notes:

• Make a decagon from a square
• Connect every fourth corner, to make a decagram
• Inscribe a pentagram inside the decagram
• The central pentagon of the pentagram is the purse portion
• The puff star is made by folding another pentagram inside the central pentagon and by making another pentagon around it.
• Make your tato and then hide the edges
• Pop the sides of the tato in to make a puff star

That will make more sense if you look at the crease pattern and pay some special attention to the gray lines. And I will confess, that after teaching pentagonal shapes all weekend, I realize it can sound a bit like gnostic formulae if you’re not used to it. Let those who can hear, hear — the rest of you lot, study up.

¶ Much thought is going into tato boxes, whereof the dining room is slowly being buried. A crease pattern for the above. It’s like learning a dance or a fencing move, but with a lot of trial-and-error, as we discover which steps matter and which are ornamental. And then we forget again. Someday, it’ll be a handy algorithm, but not today. (The curves, here, are particularly difficult to describe. When I make them, I know the curve wants to go thisaway and then thataway — the word is probably tractrix, but this is just a sound to me.) Mélisande* and I will be teaching a Monday session on tato boxes at the Convention this year, by the bye.

¶ Eric Gjerde’s book is slowly fighting its way out of the world of forms and into a bookstore near you. Keep your eyes peeled.

¶ I am profoundly dissatisfied with the constitutional structure of OUSA. There, I said it. You don’t have to do anything about it — I’m certainly not going to. I like and respect the people in the administration, but it has been and continues to be a regional group that pretends to represent a nation of folders. It doesn’t. Bless them, they’re trying, but you can’t put web 2.0 lipstick on a 19th century pig. We need a whole new model hog.

¶ Brazilian mathematician and origami artist, Jorge C. Lucero has launched a blog, chock full of interesting things. Of course, I spent ten minutes trying to google the Greek mathematician, Antigüidade. I had never heard of him and he posed some fascinating problems. Hmm. No, I won’t tell you who he is.

¶ If you like folding dollars, you might try this. It’s a variation of the Dollars to Doughnuts fold and divides the dollar into a 9 x 21-point-something grid. Named the Hoppin’ Bobbin, a bobbin being a small steel gizmo that sits under the plate of a sewing machine and holds thread. You lap the left end over the right to the gray vertical — it represents the 16th division — and then collapse like a mad thing. There is no trick to this, just brute force and psycho-accuracy. You’re left with a one-sheet hyperboloidal spring that you can play tiddlywinks with. Or quarters, maybe.

Hey, you’ve got to do something with your dollars — you sure as hell can’t buy oil with them. Have a crease pattern.

Because the Lazy Susan is the oldest version I know of the kaki lock, I keep coming back to it. Here, I just keep the central compartment — hence, the name — and turn the other four into Argentine pleating. (Robert Harbin says such pleating comes from Argentina and I will not argue with him.)

I rather like this — it stands up straight and catch the eye nicely. Give it a try — here’s a crease pattern.

Proprietary origami is the old sow that eats her own farrow.

That line is cheerfully stolen from James Joyce — farrow being an old way of saying piglets.

The two-piece pig was created by Akira Yoshizawa or Adolfo Cerceda, depending on your point-of-view, and is found in Harbin’s Secrets of Origami. The piglets are an adaptation of a traditional model by Jack Skillman, diagrammed in Randeltt’s Best of Origami. (Yes, yes, I own both books. Came by them honest, too.)

Just a call to sanity and a reminder that the best way to respect and support the work of professional origami artists is to not emulate them. If you’re an amateur origami artist, do you really need to control your work in all places and in all times? Creative Commons licensing is a better alternative to the superstition-laden copyright and will do much more to promote the art than trolling eBay for ebooks. Stop trying to nail Jell-O™ to the wall and join the party — it isn’t origami till you share it.

I like this model because it traps very little paper to very good effect. I was going to figure out how much of the surface area was hidden, but then thought, who cares? It’s a beautiful spring, finally. Man is the animal who measures, but also the one who doesn’t have to.

Me, I’m no great fan of petunias — they have this earthy smell, sort of like tomato plants, that I find off-putting, May be the reformed addict’s revulsion to all things solanacean, I don’t know. But I greatly admire the ruffledness on a petunia blossom.

Here are some directions on how to make one from scratch. (There’s nothing shameful in folding the CP, either, if you’re just after the immediate gratification.) The directions, by the way, direct you to start with a pentagon in a circle, so you may want to start here.
—

Oh, yes — our friend in RFK reminds us, we have not sent our love and duty to Mr. Mukasey, as we said we would. There is precious little to say: he has proven consistent to the promise of his youth, much comfort he may have in that. But he is no longer a young man and would do well to remember that there is another Justice waiting, one that is not a government department and one that will not be impressed with star chamber choplogic and candyass lettres de cachet. It is not too late to tell the truth. We understand there are special web sites for such things.

Our hundredth post is pointed at a lovely rosebud by Rudolf Deeg, who is, like so many of the original folders, a professional magician. His website has a selection of lovely renditions of the the available origami roses, but when I saw this photo in the Foldingfreaks pool, I recognized something immediately. Although the nether portions of this are clearly Kawasakian, there”s a certain open flavor around the closed top of the bud. This is, I fancy, one of those hybrids that are stronger than either parent. All kinds of future, here.

And the Magician Deeg is no temperamental prima donna, neither — he forthrightly puts his crease pattern right out there. Rock on, Rudolf!

Magicians, by the way, love your humble narrator, for no more credulous worm ever crawled this earth. You know that trick, where the magician puts a coin on your palm and you close your fingers on it and it turns into a different coin? Yeah, one guy played that on me five times and I just kept saying, “Wow….”

I wasn’t going to blog this idea, it being so manifestly impure and all, but it showed up on the BOS list and Jeff Rutzky has been having so much fun with it, I just had to write.

Some months back, I made a curved surface fold from the traditional cocaine paper and called it the pillow box.

Then, I started reading Geometric Folding Algorithms by Erik Demaine and Joseph O’Rourke — kind of a slow read for me. Although clear of prose and exquisite of illustration, it’s way above my understanding. Co-workers, observing me read it at lunch, report that they can see a small cumulus cloud above my head, with a dancing monochrome mouse in it and Turkey in the Straw played upon one string. The authors therein describe the teabag problem and I thought to myself, didn’t I fold that already?

That won’t stop me from folding it a million times more. A bit of research reveals that Andrew Kepert of Newcastle University probably folded it a few years ago, but can I find his website? No. If you can, let me know.

Anyway, here are some dreadfully impure crease patterns to play with, you know, if you don’t mind taking a shower afterwards.

The version pictured at the top crease pattern.

A version better adapted to cardstock crease pattern.

(You can make this one into a cube, you know.)

A tetrahedral version crease pattern. Looks like this:

(”Up the yin-yang” or more commonly, “up the wazoo,” is an American euphemism, meaning, “in excess.” Kind of a fossilized euphemism, since most of us can’t conjure what it is we’re not saying. Wazoo is probably a transliteration of the French oiseau, but who knows why?)

New and exciting, if you’re a purist:

Teabag Problem Box, Pure Version

I have this longish post about the evils of encroaching copyright, but it keeps boring me to death and I still haven’t finished it. So, while we’re all waiting for that little gem of wisdom to roll off the presses, why not take a whack at a simpler version of the Frangipani Box? This is a version I’m working up for teaching at conventions later this year. (Did I mention I’m going to Verbania in December?)

How is it simpler? Well, I like to think that the folding sequence is more, you know, sequential. You start with a pentagon in a circle, always a good place to start. Then you carefully examine the crease pattern. (Postscript.) There are a variety of ghost lines floating around here that will help you find the answers you will need to complete the model.

• Where do the five curves around the edges come from?
• How do we make the pentagon for the bottom of the box?
• How do we know where the mountain fold on the side of the box crosses the curved fold?
• How do we know where the mountain fold on the top of the box crosses the mid line?

And you may be saying, “What’s so simple about that?” Not simple, my dear chap, simpler.

You may also be saying, “Do the mountain folds on the side of the box really need to be curved?” And the answer is, maybe not so much. Here’s a crease pattern (Postscript) where the folds are straight. The difference in the finished model is subtle. I prefer the curved version.

Big howdy to our readers in Taiwan. What’s happening?

I don’t think Evil Mad Scientist needs the likes of me pointing at them, but I will.

How cool is this? How easy would it be to make a manufacturing process for this? Well, maybe not a waterbomb. Me, I’d go for something that you could press once and collapse (like a Strange Fruit, for argument’s sake), but think of the sales for weddings and quinceañeras and whatnot — oh, it’s a beautiful thought.

But such a thought would probably be banned in Boston, right?