Sorry But I'm Running Out of Title Ideas (#5)

I’m determined to get my money’s worth out of a membership I have with Venngage. (Long story. But let’s just say I’m still really bitter about having to pay the company to download a project.) So I’m back at it again with another infographic. In case you were wondering, my information about modular origami came from a book I got from the library, Mind-Blowing Modular Origami: The Art of Polyhedral Paper Folding by Byriah Loper.

Despite the fact that my research topic this week was modular origami, I normally stay away from modular origami because it requires having multiple pieces of paper of the same color(s). Well, I say requires, but it’s not really necessary. It’s just that for most pieces, it looks weird when you don’t stick to a certain color or colors. Plus, I hate that it uses up so many pieces of paper. It makes me feel like I’m wasting so much paper for just one piece, though it’s not like I’m actually wasting it. However, I discovered an old stockpile of origami I had in my living room. While limited in color choices, there were multiple pieces of each color. Since my focus this week was modular origami, I decided to make the Sonobe Module. Created by Mitsunobu Sonobe in the 1970s, the Sonobe Module is a modular unit that paved the way for numerous new, modular designs and variations over the next couple of decades. The basic design is a parallelogram with two tabs and two "pockets." Into these pockets, corresponding tabs of other Sonobe units can be inserted to form a number of polyhedra. My finished unit only had six modules since I haven’t really tried modular origami before, and I figured going for more would probably be too extreme. I have found an octahedron version, though, that looks cool, so I may try that next week.

As for my other pieces, I ended up technically learning six instead of my normal five. Earlier today, Katherine over at http://creatingwhyallthefuss.blogspot.com/ taught me how to make a pinwheel. Despite it being one of those classic, beginner origami pieces, I had never actually learned how to make it before. Katherine claims she’s terrible at origami, but it’s not like folding a pinwheel is easy enough that a baby could do it. (A simple dog or cat head? Now that’s what I call easy.) The last four folds are actually slightly complicated.

Other than that, I also made a slinky dog (which is so fun to compress and stretch out), a koi fish, a bunny, and a cat-heart-pocket-thing. The koi fish gave me the most trouble since I ripped the paper folding the koi fish the first time around, and I had a great deal of trouble shaping the body (so it’s a bit wrinkly). For the fish I had to pull back the tail while holding the mouth and puff up the paper so that the body section would be round, but it was kind of tough when the paper kept folding in on itself instead of staying inflated. The slinky dog was pretty complicated, because it requires a billion folds, making it easy to fold the wrong thing. It was totally worth it though. However, the cat heart box definitely wins first place in this week's lineup. I mean, look how cute it is. I talked about the bunny in my video blog, so if you’ve watched that you know that, like the koi, it was also pretty problematic. In the end it came out okay, though.

Once again, I found myself folding origami in class. It seems to just be a reflex now. I’m folding so often now that it kind of just… happens. We got handed a rectangular piece of pink paper in German, and as soon as we were done with it, I had ripped a strip off, turning it into a square. Frau Wilson didn’t seem mad since she said she liked the crane I made out of it, though I’m not sure whether or not she realized I was folding it during class. In homeroom I made a second, teeny-weeny one by ripping a square off the strip I ripped off the original piece of paper. Despite it being like 2 cm by 2 cm, I folded it in like 2 minutes, a new record for me. Part of me suspects that it’s because of all the practice I’ve gotten with folding from this project which is pretty cool. As a bonus I've also included a picture of some random origami I can't even remember folding. (Pretty sure I made it Health class though...)

I’m also super excited since I think I hit the jackpot with this site: https://www.paperkawaii.com/ There’s a ton of video tutorials, neatly organized, with difficulty ratings. I seriously wish I had stumbled across this site earlier. The owner of the site also runs a different website at http://www.papercrystal.com which has a bunch of free, printable origami paper patterns. Everything is so aesthetic which makes me weirdly giddy… I only discovered it today, so only one of my pieces comes from the site, the cat heart box. (I’d already completed my other ones). I’m totally trying more of the tutorials next week though since there’s a bunch of creative designs I haven’t seen before. There's no narration for the videos, but it goes at the best pace I've seen so far. Slow enough that I'm not constantly pausing, but not so slow that it feels tedious.

Want to learn this week’s pieces yourself? Check out the links below!
Cat Heart Pocket
Bunny
Koi Fish
Sonobe Cube
Slinky Dog