Category: Origami

This year the OUSA annual convention was about a month later than usual.  You’d think that would give me more time to prepare, but no, I was busy doing other things.  I had a whole list in my mind of new models I wanted to fold, but after an explosive year or exploration last year, there was a bit of regression to the mean.  I did fold a handful of new versions of existing designs, some of which I never quite perfected, and are now revised and refined.  These include my Spacecat, Platypus, Heavy Rocket, and my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron, (which could probably use a more evocative if less technically accurate name; it looks something like a soccer ball composed of eighty triangles).  Most of these I folded from a new kind of handmade tissue foil which I bought at last year’s convention.  It’s very attractive, well made, and comes in a great variety of colors including bright, dark and earth tones.  Some have a bit of sparkle or texture.  Very good for models that require sculpting that you don’t want to wetfold. 

I arrived Friday evening with Jeannie and Michelle.  The convention was at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan again this year, right at the north end of Times Square. The first thing was to check in and set up my exhibit, which also included a bunch of classic models.  I have a pretty deep bench so I rounded it out with whatever fit my mood.  After dinner we met a bunch of origami friends including John Montroll and Brian Webb, who hasn’t been to a New York convention in quite a few years, so it was great to see him.  It seems everyone had a story about where they spent the eclipse.  John is up to his tenth Origami Symphony Book, the conceit being each is divided into four “movements” which explore a related set of models or subjects in some depth.  So he had lots of fun diagrams to share.

Saturday was the first day of classes.  I didn’t do any classes in the morning, but at lunchtime Jeannie, Michelle and I went shopping to the gundam anime store, Kinokuniya, and Midtown Comics.  I was there mostly to look around, but I was inspired to buy a Mecchagodzilla action figure.  We had lunch at Kati Roll, which I hadn’t been to in a long time.  In the afternoon I taught my Spacecat.  The class was full and it went over well.  It’s a pretty complex model, but everyone finished and had time to do the sculpting.  After that I folded a couple different cat models from other creators.  When classes were done it was time for the annual meeting.  I took on a new function this year as the election proxy.  It was my job to count the votes for election for the officers and board members of the organization and announce them at the meeting.

At dinner time we went to a local bar called Names and Faces.  Back when the convention was at the Fashion Institute, we often used to go a neighborhood bar Mustang Sally’s at the end of the night.  It grew into a real scene over the years.  Brian and Paul Frasco were trying to bring this idea back and found a good place near the hotel.  It was a pretty good crowd, but since it was only dinner time everyone went back to the convention.  A few returned to the bar for late-night folding.

Sunday I took Brian Chan’s lecture on origami photography.  I found this very helpful, especially the focus on lighting.  At lunchtime I ran the annual Paper Airplane contest.  This was my second year at it.  It’s mostly kids but they really get into it.  There’s three categories: distance, accuracy and time aloft.  The prizes are gift certificates for the store where you can buy origami books and paper and tools and trinkets.  There was some kind of street fair going on outside the hotel, so for lunch I got some kind of rice bowl and zeppoli. 

After lunch I taught my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron.  This is a very advanced model, but I’ve been practicing and I brought some tools (paperclips and chopsticks) for the class to use to help hold the model together and poke inside while midway thru folding it.  Unfortunately a few of the students didn’t listen to directions and messed up precreasing the grid.  But most went on the more challenging 3-D part.  Afterwards a couple of the students came up to me and said they really liked the model and plan to fold it for the giant folding competition that evening.  I said it almost certainly wouldn’t work but collapse under its own weight.

That evening we went out to dinner with John Montroll and Pei, a convention special guest from China.  Pei does beautiful work that is sculptural, sometimes very complex, and super expressive.  He has a great eye for form.  His signature piece is a deer with antlers like a tree full of many, many tiny flowers, folded from a single square.  John has travelled extensively in Asia and was quite happy serving as a guide, making Pei feel at ease, asking about things China and telling him things about America. 

After dinner was the giant folding contest and shaw’nuff there was a team folding my model from the afternoon, a giant pink soccer ball about a yard across, made up of triangles, folded from a single ten-foot square of paper.  Paper that big tends to resemble cloth when you work with it, all floppy.  But I underestimated the strength and rigidity of the form.  The triangles scaled up from about an inch on a side to a foot, but that was still small enough for the paper to hold its shape on the network of creases.  Very impressive; indeed they won a prize.

Monday was a bit quieter since a good fraction of the people didn’t stay for the last day.  I took a class of Pei’s, a Hippocampus with an unusual and creative way of making the tail.  In the afternoon I took a class on pentagonal flowers, followed by Boice Wong doing one of his box-pleated human figures.  I ended it up doing a class on towel folding, which introduced a couple moves outside the regular origami vocabulary such as rolling and twisting.  The perfect way to cap a weekend of crazy complex stuff.

There’s always a banquet Monday night.  The last couple years the venue has been pretty dismal, but this year it was at Carmine’s, a big Italian restaurant, the kind place that has pictures of guys like Dean Martin on the walls.  It’s right off Times Square, in fact where Ollie’s used to be, right across the street from where I used to work.  We had a whole room upstairs to ourselves, with a bar even.  Perfect.  The food was great: lasagna and chicken and eggplant parmesan, and salads and appetizers and pistachio cannolis for desert.  Brian and I had a couple cocktails too.  It was a family style situation, so in the end they said anyone who was local could take home a tray of food.  Jeannie grabbed some eggplant and pasta and a tray of cannolis.  Yum. 

Then it was time to say goodbye.  Bam! came and went until the next convention.

Summer continues.  The weather’s been either really hot or really rainy, or sometimes both.  Been busy with things.

Last week I went into the the office pretty much every day for work, because it was the summer onsite for our research fellows.  This turned out to be alot of fun, because the fellows are smart and interesting people, plus I got to spend face time with the people on my team.  However, by the end of the week I was pretty fried.  I was able to keep my workout and music practice routine, but didn’t do any biking, partly due to commuting and partly because of the weather.

Saturday was a beautiful day and we went out the beach at Robert Moses State Park.  The waves were pretty rough but once you got out past the breakers it was okay, and I took a couple nice swims in the ocean.  Sunday it rained all day, so I ended up catching up on my rest and on some random tasks.  No mustang, no bike ride this weekend, but I finally got out on my bike again today.

I finished the updates to my music site, including the page for Spacecats, now featuring our new drummer Rick.  We’re starting to actively look for gigs, and to that end I’ve started recording our rehearsals, particularly a batch of new originals we’re working up.  Hopefully I’ll post some of these soon.

I’ve also been woodshedding the sax part to A Plague of Frogs.  I’ve been just laying down a take or two a couple times a week.  They started kinda rough but steadily improved.  I edited together a full track from all the takes, and it’s pretty much there.  Now that I understand the part, I’ve done a few more takes to hopefully bring it to the next level.

Another thing I got done was to take some pictures of my new origami models.  The most important of these is the Single-Sheet Stellated Icosahedron, which I’ve been working on since the wintertime, and debuted in my exhibit at the recent OUSA convention.  Shown here are two models, one made of 19″ elephant hide, and the other of 15″ skytone paper.  The next model is the Halloween Spider I folded to teach my class, made of a 10″ square of some nice tissue foil.  Lastly is a Dragon model I came up with as a kid, in third grade or so.  I remembered it all at once when a group of us were sitting around talking about early origami experiences and the first models we designed.  My brother and I used to fold dozens of them and have epic dragon battles.  

Just finished the Origami USA convention in New York City.  It was a really great time this year.  I felt like last year it was good just to be back again after the pandemic, but this year I was drawn into getting deeper into different creative ideas I was seeing in other folders’ work and in connecting and talking with people.  Also it was good to see attendance was up, including lots of first timers and lots of kids.  Maybe a few will stick around in the years to come and become the next generation’s leading origami artists.

I felt good about my new work this year.  Last fall I invented my Halloween Spider, and after attempting to teach it in the springtime I reworked the folding sequence to eliminate the “sink of doom”, which made it a good deal easier to teach and to fold.  I practice folded quite a few of them in the last couple weeks to see how it works in different kinds of paper, and to get a feel for the details of sculpting and finishing.

I also finished my big new polyhedron idea, a Stellated Icosahedron that also featured sunken stars.  It was the third in my series of icosahedron variations folded from a hexagon. Although I conceptualized it first, on my trip to Bogota in February, it turned out to be the hardest to fold by far.  I finally got a model completed a couple weeks ago, but then I attempted to wetfold it and it ended up looking not very nice, so I started over.  By the final attempt I finally knew how it would go together without experimenting, so was able to do some precision precreasing to help it along.  I used a fairly large sheet of Elephant Hide, about 19″ square before cutting.  I did a second, smaller one out of a sheet of Skytone paper, about 15″, which was also very nice but a bit more delicate.

In addition to Jeannie and Michelle, we had a houseguest this year: our friend Madonna, who we got to know in Bogota.  She won the OUSA Convention teaching award this year, but that only included three nights in the hotel.  So she stayed with us Thursday and Friday.  Madonna is mainly into tessellations, often out of a grid of triangles on a hexagon sheet.  This doesn’t overlap much with what I do, but is nevertheless quite interesting and beautiful.  Almost as soon as she arrived at our place, she noticed our fridge magnets which are a combination of hexagons, triangles and rhombi, and set about the rearrange them to demonstrate some patterns that were in her mind.  We hung out folding late into the night and exchanging ideas. She gifted me lots of skytone paper, which is one of my new favorites.  It’s alot like Elephant hide but thinner, and comes in great marbled pastel colors.

The convention itself was great.  We arrived Friday afternoon and started seeing alot of our origami friends as they trickled in.  I set up my exhibit, which had a bunch of new stuff as I mentioned.  I chose some classic models to set off the new stuff, including more polyhedra and insects, some animals from my Sculptures book, and a few spacecraft.  We mainly just hung out and folded Friday night, and went out to dinner.  John Montroll was there, with lots of new diagrams, and it was good to catch up.  

Paul Frasco and Ryan Dong folded the world’s largest origami swan out of an eighteen-foot square of paper, certified for the Guinness Book of World Records.  One cool thing was that Paul built an armature of out PCV pipe to support the model’s weight.  He assembled it as the model was being finished, and it looked totally improvised.  But it was pretty clear he had an adaptable plan that would fit to the proportions of the folded paper without having to know the dimensions ahead of time.  Very smart. Once the swan was stood up, it was fifteen feet long and ten feet tall, and looked like a dinosaur in a museum exhibit.  Very impressive.

Saturday we got there early since Madonna was teaching a class first session.  I took a class for someone else’s Spider, a box pleated model with a clever asymmetrical development to form the legs.  I taught my first class in the afternoon, my Foxy Fox from the Sculptures book.  The class was very full and had one or two too many kids who were a little too talkative and weren’t paying enough attention, so that made it challenging. Still the class was a success and everyone folded a nice fox.  

I had agreed to teach this class because there was a call from the convention committee that there weren’t enough mammals being taught, and I knew this one would work well in a single period class.  I haven’t really checked in with the models from this book in a while, so it was fun to revisit.  Kind of makes me want to do a new version with new improvements and refinements I’ve incorporated over time as my style and skills have evolved.  Same with my Loon, which I taught to my friend Kathleen.

Sunday at lunchtime I ran the paper airplane competition.  I’d never done this before and had  some help from Paul Frasco and Steve Rollin, who had participated in the past.  It was pretty intense!  There were contests for distance, accuracy and time aloft.  The distance winner went over fifty feet, and the time winner over three seconds.  In the target contest, the fist and third place winners were separated by only one half of an inch!

Sunday afternoon I taught my Halloween Spider.  There were only ten or so people in the class, which made it much more relaxed.  Also I had a document camera giving a close-up view of the folding in progress, projected on a giant screen.  There were a bunch of kids in this class too, but they were all already virtuoso folders and followed along without any difficulty.  The time I spent practicing paid off because we got done with time to spare, and had time to focus on the sculpting at the end.  Also, I folded mine from a sheet of tissue foil I bought at the source, so it came out looking great.  There was a new line of high-end tissue foil this year in all kinds of color combinations, in 10″ and 20″ sheets, so I bought a ton of it.

Sunday a bunch of us including John and Madonna and Marc Kirschenbaum went out for Indian food for dinner.  When we returned it was time for the giant folding competition.  Marc was running it and I helped judge for awards.  I feel like people get better at it every year, even though everyone underestimates how much a giant sheet of paper tends to behave like it’s cloth.

Monday we decided not to go into the city until noon, so I got a chance to work out in the morning.  I had lunch at Ray’s Famous Original Pizza next door to the conference hotel, which I presume is not the same as either Ray’s Famous or Ray’s Original, which were both down in Greenwich Village when I first moved there in the early 90’s.  I’d heard that Famous Ray and Original Ray had settled their feud some time ago and joined forces to become a chain. Anyway, great genuine New York pizza.  

That afternoon I gave my lecture on single-sheet polyhedra.  When I gave it at CFC in the winter, the interest was mainly on the mathematical and geometric aspects of it.  Here the crowd was a little different, and in discussion afterwards tended toward the craft and ornamental side. Still, quite well recieved.

Throughout the weekend there was alot of free folding in the hospitality area.  Jeannie and Michelle both took classes and learned some nice new modular ornamental things, and Michelle folded one of John Montroll’s complex insects, a dragonfly.  Also, I met Taro and some of the people from Taro’s Origami Studio.  I’ve been looking for a publisher to work with for my next book, and it turns out they’re getting into publishing and are looking for authors, so that might just work out.  Also Michelle is looking for work this summer and they sometimes contract out piecework folding models, so that might just work out too.  Now she describes herself as the world’s first origami nepo baby.

We had the banquet Monday night, and then it was time for goodbyes, and now here we are again back to the normal routine.  Ah well, the next big convention is in the fall, so that gives my time to fold some new models and hopefully make some progress on the publishing front.