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Origami Conventions

are great motivators for finally finishing those models that you haven’t gotten around to. The East Bay Origami Convention was this past weekend, and in addition to teaching my circus elephant, I also had a display with this model that I finally finished the night before the convention.

Origami

I’ve had this one floating around in my head ever since I saw George Hart’s Frabjous. It’s made out of 30 identical pieces intertwined as in Frabjous, although the exact shape of the pieces is a bit different, leading to a fairly distinctive end result.

One way of understanding the underlying geometry is to think of each piece as a subset of a rhombic side of the great rhombic triacontahedron, with the subset chosen such that the pieces don’t intersect.

Another strategy for understanding the model is to think of each piece as representing a line connecting opposite vertices of two adjacent pentagons in a dodecahedron. The pieces are then necessarily curved so as to avoid intersecting with each other.
The first strategy is easier if one wishes to design similar pieces. The second is easier to visualize and understand intuitively when looking at the model.
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Chopstick wrappers

Seem to exist just to give you something convenient to fold while waiting for your meal. Here are some of my recent chopstick wrapper folds – a heptagon, a trihexaflexagon, an octahedron, and the “hand holding chopsticks”.

 

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Knotted Origami

seems like just the thing that I should like – seeing as I clearly very much like origami and knots. For exhibit here is an origami cubeoctahedron out of business cards that has been wrapped by a strand of red cord. The cord wraps around several times with four strand braids occurring every time four strands overlay. The resulting shape outlined by a cord is tetrahedral. I made this on the plane to G4GX. While there, I also worked on making a business card tetrahedron wrapped with octahedral knotwork, which, unfortunately, seems to have been misplaced.

Is this the launch of a new era of hybrid origami knotwork? One can only hope. =)
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The Fuller Arts and Crafts Museum

in Brockton, MA is hosting an origami exhibit featuring the work of MIT affiliated origami artists – including myself! The exhibit details can be found here. I went to the opening – here are some photos of the stuff that I have on exhibit.

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PCOC 2009

or Pacific Coast Origami Convention, was held in San Francisco making it by far the cheapest and easiest to attend origami convention that I’ve ever been to, since I didn’t have to pay for housing.

At the banquet dinner, I participated in the origami design challenge where we had five minutes to fold first a paper toilet seat cover, then an envelope into some original design. I folded an orchid and a penguin, respectively, and earned a pretty sheet of Origamido paper for my trouble. Here are photos of me/my models taken by others. For the full galleries go here and here.