The East Bay Origami Convention

this year had the theme, “Impossible”, so I decided to stay thematic by teaching an “Impossible” origami model. Of course, I didn’t have any such model pre-designed, so my pre-convention challenge was to design a thematic model that could be taught to a mixed level audience in no more than 1 hour.

One of my early thoughts was to design an origami version of the impossible triangle illusion, but I quickly decided that that had already “been done” sufficiently. However, this got me to thinking about various illusions and impossible figures. Possibly my favorite classic illusion is the Rubin’s Vase or Face-Vase illusion, so it’s not surprising that I ended up with the Rubin’s Vase as my model.

Origami Rubin's Vase
Origami Rubin’s Trophy Cup

Folded out of gold or silver foil, it resembles a trophy cup, hence my final name for the model, the “Rubin’s Trophy Cup”. When folding out of foil, it is also possible to add some nice rounding to the cup.

Other exciting notes from EBOC 2013, include having my fox finger puppet model published in the convention book (the very first time I have ever published origami diagrams), meeting Janessa Munt, and having my non-origamist boyfriend win the scavenger hunt challenge.

The official convention website is here: http://calorigami.berkeley.edu/eboc.html and the official convention pictures are here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/2449839@N22/ 

 

2 Replies to “The East Bay Origami Convention”

    1. Nice! It’s interesting how two different designs of even such a relatively simple model idea can turn out so different. 🙂

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