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An origami that is not so simple, but easy compared to the normal flasher. Model made by Jeremy Shafer. The flasher basically expands and contracts automatically as you fold or unfold it. It’s a great way to fold maps, but the center will get used very quickly.

This model can also be wetfolded: once it’s ready put a rubber band around to hold it and then dunk it in water, once it dries it will retain its compact form and spring close itself when opened.

Diagrams on Jeremy’s website and the Video and a picture after the break.

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After a long time of absence, again, I’m hereby presenting another six pointed star. This is a modular composed of 12 pieces, very easy to fold, but a bit frustrating to assemble. When connecting the last module to the first I didn’t bother locking them because I would have torn the whole thing apart and it was sturdy enough as it was. A stellar origami by Carmen Sprung.

Diagrams over here and video after the break as usual.

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This one is really amazing, a small book of 3 pages (plus 2) made of one square paper. The video and the image are by Mark Roberts, the same who made the amazing intersecting tetrahaedra video. I couldn’t find any paper that was colored on one side and white on the other, so mine is just a small white book… wasn’t worth a picture. Now you can become a self publishing writer! And here are the diagrams.

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This pine cone is incredibly sturdy and looks almost real when looked at from far away. It’s made from a single square paper. The camera is on holidays so no video this time, but great diagrams though. Great nature origami by David Petty.

Edit (Jan 30th, 2008): I finally got around making the video, I slowed it down on the difficult parts.

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Here’s a different approach to origami. This model is made of strips of paper rather than a single paper or folded modules. It’s called a stamp machine (originally “Stampfmaschine” from German) because it can move - or more commonly known as “action model”. It consists of 16 cubes, each cube is made of 3 strips of paper, and everything is knotted together with more strips.

I used thicker paper (160g/m2) for the cubes because they had to be solid and normal paper (80g/m2) to knot them together. You’ll need 48 strips of 6 squares to make all the 16 cubes, 4 strips of 14 squares and 8 of 12 squares to knot them together (although the 14 and 12 square strips aren’t that accurate). You can get the diagrams/instructions to the cube here and the assembly here from Orihouse. A magnificent knotology by Heinz Strobl.

A few more pictures after the break.

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Here’s how to make a shuriken/throwing star. You’ll need 2 square papers, it doesn’t matter how big they are as long as they’re the same size. I get so many useless papers in my courses that I kill time by making shurikens out of them - about 200 so far. The problem with these is that they’re very light and when thrown the air pressure between the shuriken and the target will build up very quickly just before hitting it and it’ll just barely miss it (but don’t count on it, exceptions exist).

Please be careful with these, they can be very dangerous… especially if you make a big one. They’re great because it takes less than a minute to make one and they fly very far and accurately if you throw them right.

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