I made these dachshunds as part of the local origami club, and I love them.  I made two, and they immediately reminded me of the two dachshunds that my aunt owned, one light-haired the other dark-haired.  Those dogs always seemed attached at the hip, and were rather codependent.  So, I decided to attach these two at the hip.  I don’t remember how I did it, something to do with pulling out excess paper hidden inside the models.

My mother has owned dachshunds all her life, so I gave these to her as a gift.  Happy Mother’s Day this month!

(For those who didn’t know, “dachshund” is the spelling, but it’s pronounced like “doxin”.  They may also be called doxies or just weiner dogs.  I grew up with these dogs but it took me forever to learn how to spell their name.)

Here’s a collection of experiments, mistakes, and other odds and ends among my origami photos

These were my first two attempts to make a tarantula (final version here).  I didn’t expect to get it right the first time, this is all part of the process.

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This model has instructions online, and is one of the easiest curved-crease models to create.  It just requires six business cards or some other card stock paper, and some means to draw circles.  The instructions suggest using a compass or a template, but I just used a poker chip that I had on hand.  Once you draw the circles, you should score them, which can be done by pressing hard on a ballpoint pen.

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I try to post origami every month, but as of late, my rate of production has been less than that.  That’s okay, I still have a huge backlog of photos.  One thing I’ve never posted, are my very earliest photos, when I started doing modular origami in………. 2012.  Well here’s the very first one:

I started out by folding designs from Beginner’s Book of Modular Origami Polyhedra: The Platonic Solids by Rona Gurkewitz and Bennett Arnstein–it’s not the book in the photo, it’s more beginner-friendly than that.  It’s a good starter book for modular origami, I recommend it.

I didn’t dedicate much effort to the photos at the time.  The book is there because that’s what I had on the shelf.  I put my hand in the photo to give it a sense of scale; also, as if to say “Zap!  A cube!”  I went on to zap more cubes from there on.

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Today, I present a set of octagonal boxes, designed by Tomoko Fuse.  Rather than providing a design with exact specifications, Tomoko Fuse tends to present several possible variations.  This design has cosmetic variations, which create different patterns of color; and structural variations, allowing you to create wide and short boxes, or narrow and tall boxes.  These boxes don’t have covers, but the idea is that you could make two boxes of slightly different width, and use the wider one as a cover for the narrower one.  I created a set of four of slightly different dimensions, so they could be nested (image below the fold).

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Today’s origami design is a relatively simple one, but I love simple stuff like this!  You just pleat a square back and forth diagonally across the paper, and then pinch it in the middle.

For this model, I used paper with diagonal stripes, so that the stripes approximately align with the folds.  This creates an iridescent effect, as the colors subtly change depending on your viewing angle.  Now, the stripes don’t align exactly with the folds, so there’s a bit of a subtle interference pattern as well.  I love the idea of making these subtle interactions between the paper patterns and the origami design, but I think it rarely aesthetically succeeds.  This is my favorite example.

I haven’t been posting much origami lately, because I haven’t been making any.  But I still have quite a number of models in my back catalog.  This is the Three Axis Woven Design, designed by David Huffman, later reconstructed and named by Erik Demaine.

This piece was painstakingly constructed as a gift for my grand aunt, who recently died.  She was an actress who played Asian characters circa the 1950s, and was a great appreciator of the arts.  She lived a full life.

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