OrigaMIT and AMNH Holiday Tree, Part II

I spent a good amount of time at OrigaMIT just talking to people I hadn’t seen in a while. Anne, Talo, Michael and Richard, Jason, Meenakshi, Robert, Erik, and others. Talo convinced me to spend a day volunteering at the museum in New York, Anne is into welding, I got to tell Robert about my simple approach these days, and Beth too. Robert and Erik are into all kinds of cray math stuff, hardness proofs with Big-O notation and stuff like that. At one point I was explaining to someone about my Flower Ball, that it was inspired by Meenaksh’s work, and that I’d met her at Centerfold. This person was local and didn’t know Centerfold was the name of the Ohio convention. Turns out it’s also the name of a strip club in Boston!

Normally I like to take a walk down along the Charles River at lunchtime, and since it Michelle’s first time in Boston she’d enjoy it too. But it totally ran out of time.

One conversation in particular was with Michael Lafosse and Richard Alexander, who have the same publisher as I do, and have the same misgivings about the shiny printed paper they like to use. I told them I’d hate for some kid to get that paper in their first origami kit ever, and have it turn them off to origami for good. Michael told me a story of how his first oil painting experience as a kid was ruined by a cheap, crappy paintbrush. Fortunately for me, the publisher relented the day after I got back from Boston, and said they also have uncoated paper as an option. So it looks like the book is moving forward again.

My afternoon class was the new airplanes and spaceships. A few of the people in my class were kids, maybe eight to ten years old, and quite advanced. One of them I knew from other origami events. I taught my UFO II and Astronaut, which are not yet diagrammed, and also passed out diagrams for some other models, including the more complex ones like the Biplane. On the other hand, kids are funny. At one point one of them complained about how there was so much folding. I mean really? It’s friggin’ origami!

A couple of the kids stayed late cuz we got to talking. One suggested I make a Mothership UFO that’s sort of a fractal conglomeration of the UFO I have. I showed him my Hemi Flowerball, which is kind of the same idea, each cell in the model divided down to make a the pattern of the whole model. He said why not go three levels deep? This really blew my mind, cuz beleive it or not I hadn’t thought of that before. It would be a damn cool model, but it would take all winter to fold.

That night the four kids joined together to form a team and rocked the giant folding competition. Their theme was Bug Wars, a play on the bug wars of the 1990’s (go look it up if you don’t know), but they took it literally. Each one folded a complex insect (one of them of the kid’s own design) and then had the bugs fight. Way cool!

Next up: the Holiday Tree!

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