Last weekend I taught an origami special folding session at the Natural History Museum. I taught my Elephant and Moose. The class did really well considering it was two complex models and we went pretty fast. One of my students was a seven-year-old kid who did fantastic. I taught the Elephant first. It has only about half the number of steps of the Moose, but it’s a far more subtle and complex model because there’s no base per se, but there’s lots of compound folds and 3-D sculpting. The Moose is based on an older design style (uses a variation of the stretched bird base) and has mostly simpler folds, but lots more of them. This is proving to be a very popular model, maybe because there aren’t alot of origami mooses out there and almost no-one (myself included) has the patience to fold Robert Lang’s.
I’ve diagrammed both of these models for my book and it’s interesting to see how much communication is really necessary to get a model across and how much of that can be captured in diagrams. The really skilled folders have no problem with anything, and are helpful in pointing out mistakes in my diagrams. But I feel that making the models and diagrams good enough to reach out to intermediate folders so they can tackle something above their level and succeed is an important goal, not just for the sake of reaching a broader audience but for origami in general as an art form. I never had any origami people in my life when I was growing up, and learned solely from books, mainly John Montroll’s.
Speaking of which, John came up for a visit over the weekend, which is always a fun time. He’s got loads of new polyhedra models that he’s arranging into a sequel to his forthcoming Polyhedra book with A. K. Peters. He also has a brand new book out with Dover called Storytime Origami which includes among other things a very cool wolf.
The girls came to the museum with me. We had enough time to take a quick tour of the outer space hall and the dinosaurs. Lizzy really like the dinosaurs but Michelle thought they were a bit creepy (she never has before). I told her not to worry because it’s very rare that the dinosaur ghosts find their bones and reanimate as undead dino-skeletons. This didn’t seem to reassure her. When we got home that evening we watched the Space Shuttle launch, which tied in nicely to the theme of the day. The kids had never seen a shuttle launch, and apart from the sheer spectacle of it, they were pretty blown away that after just a few minutes the shuttle was 50 miles high and hundreds of miles away, and going at the thousands of miles per hour and just getting faster.