random origami
Oct. 11th, 2006 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138Having discovered a few weeks ago that I'd forgotten how to complete a Kawasaki rose, I hauled out my copy of Origami for the Connoisseur and stumbled my way back through the directions. It'll probably take a few more roses before I actually remember all of the steps again.
Meanwhile, for the past few days I've been poking through some tamatebako models, which interested me because of their presence in myth as well as their (alleged) properties-- it's a long-lost origami pattern which was apparently lost for several centuries but was finally reconstructed from sketches in a historical manuscript. It's a cubical box which can be opened from any one of its six faces, but supposedly if you open too many faces, the entire box falls apart. However, it's not a "pure" origami pattern because it involves both scissors and glue.
Or at least that's what the modern instructions say. Each of the six component modules definitely needs to have center slits cut through the middle, but I'm getting pretty sure that while the glue helps get the entire thing assembled, it also defeats the falling-apart property. Most descriptions say that just two open sides will cause disintegration; a few say that if all six sides are open, the box will be at least very difficult to close up again. Nuh-uh. I've tested various gluing methods and found what seems to be the minimal application to comply with the modern instructions, and even then the completely-opened tamatebako just sits there like a whirly-looking hexahedral kusudama. Folding it back up from that is still trivially easy, too.
Which put me in mind of actual kusudama patterns, though as it turns out, I must've traded in my copy of Tomoko Fuse's kusudama book at some point. Still, I managed to cobble together a spiky cube thing held together by crimped paper hinges instead of glue or string, so I suppose there's a compensating nod to origami purism right there. Whee.
...well, I guess the next obvious step is to make another tamatebako, assemble it without glue, and play with it until it falls apart properly. The cats would probably be happy to take over that last step, but I'd rather test it under more controlled circumstances first.
Meanwhile, for the past few days I've been poking through some tamatebako models, which interested me because of their presence in myth as well as their (alleged) properties-- it's a long-lost origami pattern which was apparently lost for several centuries but was finally reconstructed from sketches in a historical manuscript. It's a cubical box which can be opened from any one of its six faces, but supposedly if you open too many faces, the entire box falls apart. However, it's not a "pure" origami pattern because it involves both scissors and glue.
Or at least that's what the modern instructions say. Each of the six component modules definitely needs to have center slits cut through the middle, but I'm getting pretty sure that while the glue helps get the entire thing assembled, it also defeats the falling-apart property. Most descriptions say that just two open sides will cause disintegration; a few say that if all six sides are open, the box will be at least very difficult to close up again. Nuh-uh. I've tested various gluing methods and found what seems to be the minimal application to comply with the modern instructions, and even then the completely-opened tamatebako just sits there like a whirly-looking hexahedral kusudama. Folding it back up from that is still trivially easy, too.
Which put me in mind of actual kusudama patterns, though as it turns out, I must've traded in my copy of Tomoko Fuse's kusudama book at some point. Still, I managed to cobble together a spiky cube thing held together by crimped paper hinges instead of glue or string, so I suppose there's a compensating nod to origami purism right there. Whee.
...well, I guess the next obvious step is to make another tamatebako, assemble it without glue, and play with it until it falls apart properly. The cats would probably be happy to take over that last step, but I'd rather test it under more controlled circumstances first.
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Sorry!
on 2006-10-12 05:28 pm (UTC)no escape now
on 2006-10-12 05:58 pm (UTC)(At some point when I was still subscribed to an origami listserv, someone had pix of a tessellation/crystallization that was a sheet of about 100 roses. That was when I decided that the listserv was way out of my league.)
And then there are the more geometric tessellations like these (http://www.flickr.com/groups/origamitessellations/pool/)-- some of them look like Celtic knotwork, or electron micrographs of virus capsules, or I dunno what-all except ZOMG.
*boggle*
on 2006-10-17 11:59 pm (UTC)