Who'd have thought boredom and lack of beer would last this long - post number 50 is here, so whip out them firecrackers and let's parrrrr-take of some origami!
The dash-dotted and dashed lines are mountain and valley folds respectively - pretty basic origami notation for folds coming out at you or going in away from you.
For Diwali, I was asked to make some boxes for sweets to be gifted - nothing large, purely a symbolic amount. Reviving some old origami interests, I looked for a box folding pattern, and found this easy one.
After making the box, I realised the square base of the box (or lid, depending on which way it's oriented) could serve as the starting sheet for any other origami item. I decided the traditional crane was the most familiar fold I could do with the constraints of being surrounded by a larger square.
If you haven't kept up with trends in origami, origami is no longer shown in step-by-step fashion like the previous links; instead, it's displayed as the opened-out pattern on the original square. Thus, the box and crane look like this respectively:
By almost cutting out the square centre of the box, I could fit the (slightly modified) folding pattern of the crane as below:
Of course, this isn't how I folded it - I just made the cuts, folded the crane step-by-step, and then folded the box step-by-step - but let's stick to convention a bit. To my horror, when the lid is done, it isn't a square box any more, but a rhombus:
This would mean I would have to modify the base as well to fit inside the lid - gah!
On inspection of the original box fold, in order to distort the central square to a rhombus, one would effectively have to pull two opposite corners, and add and remove paper at the corners of compression and tension so that the opened-out pattern would sit flat. Deriving this wasn't as hard as I expected:
A purist would have derived it from a square, but I couldn't be bothered by folding away the extra bits of paper and adding to the thickness unnecessarily, so there you have it.
In order to give the box some stiffness and create a step between the lid and the base, I made two simple cardboard templates for insertion. The result:
Normal gift-wrapping paper was inexpensive, contextual and easy-to-fold; also, I could get it in the size I needed, which brings me to the sweets.
By coincidence, there is a rhombus shaped sweet (albeit a diamond instead of a lozenge) called a kaju katli that is both delicious and festive, and fit nicely into the box with a little space to insert greedy fingers, and 34 boxes later, I was DONE.
If you want to make your own box, here's the folding pattern, scaled to Ax paper size:
With a little work, you could figure out which part of the paper corresponds to different faces of the final box, and print out your own custom pattern along with the fold pattern.
On inspection of the original box fold, in order to distort the central square to a rhombus, one would effectively have to pull two opposite corners, and add and remove paper at the corners of compression and tension so that the opened-out pattern would sit flat. Deriving this wasn't as hard as I expected:
In order to give the box some stiffness and create a step between the lid and the base, I made two simple cardboard templates for insertion. The result:
By coincidence, there is a rhombus shaped sweet (albeit a diamond instead of a lozenge) called a kaju katli that is both delicious and festive, and fit nicely into the box with a little space to insert greedy fingers, and 34 boxes later, I was DONE.
If I had known one pitcher would last so long, I wouldn't have wasted a second.
