It’s been a busy couple of weeks. First there was the origami convention and then we took a road trip upstate for the 4th to see family and friends. Now we’re back and catching up on things. We’re experiencing a major heat wave. It got up to 100 degrees today in New York City. Tomorrow’s gonna get up to a hundred and one.
It was a most excellent origami convention this year. I had six new models in my exhibit, including my Zeppelin, Turkey, Two-Color Stellated Octahedron, Great Dodecahedron, the Cairo Tessellation and its dual, which I’m calling the Cubocta Tessellation because its pattern of alternating squares and triangles reminds me of the Cuboctahedron. Classic models displayed included my Moose, Elephant, Lizard, Turtle, Rocketship and U.F.O. I’ll have pictures of mine and the other exhibits sometime soon.
I taught two classes: My U.F.O. and my Medieval Dragon. Both were well attended and went over well. The U.F.O. is a pretty advanced model and I warned them ahead of time. About a third of the class worked ahead, following my diagrams and had no problems. Most of the rest were right with me as I taught it, and there were a few who were in over their heads and couldn’t handle the precision necessary for the prefolding. The Dragon was sold out, which made it hard to teach cuz the room was big and I had to walk around a lot to show people steps close up. Again about half folded ahead and about half were with me, and I learned that a few steps in the diagrams were hard to follow. It turns out the Dragon is a great model for sculpting and I saw people do lots of cool creative interpretation with the details of the head, wings and tail.
Lizzy and Michelle were there two and folded a bunch of stuff and had a great time. They’re getting to be pretty good folders. They made friends with some other kids and stayed late Sunday for the giant folding competition. Michelle was really proud to have an Exhibitor ribbon on her badge, since she had a model in the Origami by Children exhibit.
I caught up with a bunch of my origami friends including John, Brian, Susan and Brian, and made some new friends too. John is selling iPhone and Android versions of his books now. Apparently it’s a lot of fun and at least moderately remunerative for him. He’s also coming out with four new print books this year, including new editions of the classics Dinosaur Origami and Origami Sea Life with Robert Lang, with updated diagrams and a bunch of new models. While he was in NYC John met with his publisher and they gave him back a box of models that they’d used for photos of the book cover. Some of them were Robert’s sea creatures, so John kept surreptitiously putting one or two of them on Robert’s exhibit over the course of the weekend.
Susan Thomas in addition to origami does this thing with making jewelry out of rings of chain mail and rubber o-rings. It’s a pretty cool idea and she has a book out on it, and it seems to be catching on. Jeannie made a bracelet, and Susan gave a bracelet to Lizzy and Michelle, and they’ve all been getting lots of compliments on them. I think it’d be pretty wild to make a sweater or something using that technique.
I met Roman Diaz from Uruguay, who is a very nice guy and brilliant origami artist. I want to get his new book, Origami Essence, but they were sold out of it at the convention. I gave him one of my models, a half Stellated Dodecahedron. I met Alexis from Quebec who is an excellent folder too. I met Alexis because he took my U.F.O class and suggested an improvement to a sequence of folds. We got to talking, and I invited him to be my partner for the giant folding competition.
The giant folding was a new thing last year and it turned out to be really popular, so this year there were a lot more participants. I folded my Lizard out of a nine foot square. I figured it was a good model because the paper is so big and heavy a lot of models turn out floppy, but the Lizard lies on it’s belly and has enough layers that it’d keep its shape. I taught Alexis the model the day before and he seemed to have basically memorized it, so we had no problem folding it in the allotted hour. And it turned out looking really cool, like an ice blue Komodo Dragon. And we even won the prize for coolest model. A lot of other teams made really nice models too. Some standouts were Roman’s frog and Aviv’s Kawasaki Rose. Lizzy folded a snake. We’re gonna burn ours when we go camping later this month.
The most interesting class I took on Monday was by Nathan Zeichner, who is a CS student developing his own origami software. It has an interesting spin in that it’s part of a project to create self-folding origami robots, if you can believe that. I talked to him a length after his lecture. He said he was inspired by my paper in 3OSME.
Since lots of people were asking about it, I have to say I feel good about how my book is shaping up. I have over 100 pages diagrammed now. I’ve organized into chapters and have a few more models to design and diagram to round things out. I’ve decided to jettison my polyhedra for a future book since I have enough material already and they will be really hard to diagram. So that suddenly puts me alot closer to completion. It also puts the center of gravity in the intermediate to complex range rather then the supercomplex, which I think will have a broader appeal.
Next up: road trippin’. Coming soon OUSA Convention pictures.