Striped Box, designed by me
Once a year I run a little origami class for kids, for someone I know. As a self-imposed constraint, I always teach modular origami. It’s hard to find simple modular origami models that kids can do in a reasonable amount of time!
I’ve wanted to make a modular origami box, and a big one so that it can hold other origami inside. So I bought some colored A4 paper, and looked around for a simple box design. None of them were quite to my liking, so I made my own design. There’s no lid for this box, because we’re keeping it simple. I have folding diagrams if you’d like to try.
The trickiest part is connecting the fourth unit, and I didn’t really draw diagrams showing it in detail. It’s much easier to show in a classroom. So if you’re doing this at home by yourself, unfortunately you’re doing it on hard mode.
During class, one of the parents pointed out an alternate way to fit the pieces together, and I decided that her way was better than mine. So afterwards I went back and adjusted the design (the diagrams above show the newer version). Even simple designs like this are iterative.
this one is friendly for beginners like me 🙂 also the color reminds me a popsicle from my childhood, I don’t remember the brand name.
Whenever I put yellow and red together, people tell me: it’s ketchup and mustard.
So… I assume that’s what your popsicles were made of.
( >︹<) ketchup and mustard popsicle
Oh I have a recent origami story.
So I have this book of complicated origami animals, and my son saw that one of the designs is a beetle and he simply NEEDED me to make it for him. (I can’t believe none of the parenting books ever mentioned this.) So I did. He was very happy with it and took it to daycare because he always brings a toy or something to daycare.
But also, it seems kind of unnatural to me, to make something with 6 skinny little legs out of a flat piece of paper, makes me think it must be difficult to design something like that.
Anyway, do you ever make origami bugs with skinny legs and/or get requests from small children about things they want you to make?
Yeah, I occasionally offer to make stuff for young relatives, and I ask if they have any requests. Then I just look up videos online.
In origami design, an important concept is the number of “points” in a model. “Points” include such things as legs or antenna. So there’s something called the origami insect wars (or bug wars) where a bunch of origamists competed to make increasingly complicated insects with more and more points.