Busy times continue. The week after the CoCon origami convention in Chicago was OrigaMIT. This of course is MIT’s origami convention up in Boston, and one of the funnest ones out there, because of the size, venue, general vibe, and emphasis on origami math and theory in addition to the usual teaching models and exhibition. And also the crowd it attracts. They haven’t had one for three years, so it’s good to be back. I saw a bunch of origami friends I hadn’t seen in a while.
I largely reused my exhibit from Chicago. And I taught two of the same models as in Cocon, and they were well received. Brian Chan gave an excellent talk on how he’s using various CAD software to model constraints, which helps him come up with some very advanced and artistic crease patterns. His new Scorpion in particular is just mind-blowing.
I ended up spending most of the evening with Beth, Brian and Adrienne, it’s just invaluable to be able to getting into deep conversations with other folders at the level. In Chicago I started designing a new spider, which I’m calling Hallowe’en Spider. It’s inspired by some of those classic models with multiple sunken preliminary bases grafted together, but the overall technique is more modern and well integrated. The goal was a detailed, quasi-realistic looking spider with a fairly straightforward geometry that can be folded in half an hour or so. I also wanted nice fat legs to make is scarier.
I came pretty close. There’s not alot of steps, but one of them is a fairly complex sink that’s repeated four times. At one point Saturday night I was showing Beth what I was up to, and explaining how I needed to adjust the proportions and what were some of my options. She said, “why don’t you just pleat right here?”, and that turned out to be just the thing.
Over the next few days I finished a few more models, continuing to refine it. I folded a pair of large spiders out of 15″ paper. One of them is for the American Museum of Natural History’s origami holiday tree. I haven’t contributed to this in a few years, but this year the them was World of Bugs, so how could I resist? In addition to the Spider, I folded one of my butterflies and one of my inchworms, also out of large paper.
Meanwhile back home, it’s peak leaf raking season the last couple weeks, with a couple more weeks to go. And I finally got around to trying to replace the busted ceiling light in my kitchen with a new one I bought back in September, but was on backorder and finally arrived. However, when I took out the old fixture I discovered it had been screwed directly to the ceiling and there was no electrical cup to hold the weight and connect to mounting hardware to for the new lamp. So now I gotta cut a hole in the ceiling, install a cup, patch up the drywall, sand and paint it, and then I’ll be able to go ahead and install the new light fixture. Ah, good times.
