July 22, 2025
Just got back from the Origami USA 2025 Convention. Lots of fun, lots, of folding, lots of friends. The big news this year is that Jeannie joined the convention committee and helped run everything on site all weekend, including leading the registration and check in. This being a volunteer organization, lots of people including myself were quite happy she stepped up to join the leadership.
Meanwhile I spent the week before the convention trying to advance some ideas I had for new models. I kinda had a hard getting back into doing origami this year. Martin passed away just two weeks after last year’s convention, and it took me until the winter to unpack my stuff, and this led to a whole reorganization of my studio. I threw out several boxes worth of old origami, and as I went thru them I rediscovered a bunch of ideas I’d been working on. I finally got out of my rut in springtime when Ilan asked me to make a video for an upcoming online event. The model was my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron, which is composed of triangle and sunken pentagonal pyramids in the shape of a ball. I perfected some internal details of the folding sequence and closure. This led me to also perfect my Dimpled Icosahedron, and a variation with hexagons and pentagons like a soccer ball.
I was on a roll, so I dusted off an idea that I had never finished before, a Dimpled Dodecahedron, where the sunken triangles make the overall form that resembles an icosidodecahedron. The dodecahedron is a very hard shape to fold, for a few reasons. First, it’s made of pentagons, and so requires a fivefold geometry throughout. Second, unlike squares, rectangles, rhombi, triangles or hexagons, pentagons do not tile the plane, so one must use a non-repeating quasicrystal pattern for the layout. Third, once you get into the 3-D part of it, the faces come together in threes, so there’s no straight lines on the internal layers that develop. They always have to turn a corner, which can get awkward and difficult.
I’d folded a version this shape before, using a layout that has the middle of a pentagonal face at the center of the paper (a.k.a. the north pole), and five flaps from the edges of the paper coming together to form the lock at the south pole. This layout works well for models such as my Stellated Dodecahedron and Great Dodecahedron, where there’s a vertex in the center of what would other wise be a pentagonal face. But it’s unsatisfactory for the Dimpled Dodecahedron, because one of the faces is not smooth but has the five pinwheel flaps coming together.
So I’ve been trying to work out a new layout where the center of the paper is a the vertex of three pentagons, and the lock is also three pentagons coming together with tabs in a spiral. Unfortunately, this layout is even harder. For one thing, it requires a decagon rather than a pentagon as the starting shape, since the central point has three wedges of 3/10 coming together for the pentagons, and a gap of 1/10. Then this gap becomes an internal ridge that has to get folded away in a zigzag fashion to get to the south pole. I folded a number of studies, but but had not worked out how to close the model by Friday afternoon when it was time to head into the city for convention.
Jeannie had gone in to the city in the morning by train, and Michelle and I drove in after she got home from work. Once we arrived it was the usual chaos and buzz of setting up my exhibit, meeting up with friends, going out to dinner and returning for late night folding. We stayed at the hotel Friday and Saturday nights since Jeannie had be there early to run the registration desk.
Saturday morning I ended up in the exhibit space talking to people the whole morning. For lunch a group of us found a Mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast burritos along with margaritas. In the afternoon I taught my first class: my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, two of my favorite models from my spaceship collection. Each is foldable in ten to twenty minutes. That evening a bunch of use went to an Irish pub for dinner.
When we got back I showed John Montroll my progress with my dodecahedron and explained the difficulty with the hidden layers of paper. I know he’s spent alot of time thinking and working on one-sheet polyhedra, having written several books on the topic. He took one look at my CP and immediately spotted a troublesome confluence of pentagons. He suggested an alternative layout where three pentagons come together and the negative space between them forms a sort of double fork, which can be collapsed symmetrically, thus sidestepping the turn-the-corner problem. I modified my design to take advantage of his insight and began folding a new study. This was a three-quarter sphere (nine pentagons instead of twelve) to see if the layout would work in practice before I dealt with designing the closure and the lock. Shawnuff it was a big improvement, although it took me until Sunday afternoon to get far enough to demonstrate it.
Sunday lunchtime I ran the Paper Airplane contest, this time with the help of Michelle and Paul Frasco. It’s really alot of fun and amazing how people get so into it. The space we use has a spectator gallery, which adds to the excitement. This year, in addition to the usual prizes (gift certificates for the origami store), Boice donated some high-end supercomplex books from Japan as extra prizes.
Sunday I taught another class, this time my Narwhal, which don’t believe I’ve taught before, and haven’t folded in ages. I’m kind of amazed how many people still like my book Origami Animal Sculptures, and come up to me to say it’s one of their favorite books, and ask to me sign it for them. A surprising number of people also asked me about when I’m going to publish another book. I’d love to, and indeed I have enough models for three or four books. But diagramming is alot of work, and so is pulling everything together to make a complete book out of a collection of diagrams. Right now I don’t have a publisher, so I’m looking at self-publishing on Amazon, and that’s a whole ‘nuther level of work. Not to mention that my we site is fiver year out of date for just photographing my models and posting the pics with a basic blurb.
Sunday evening a bunch of us went out to dinner at a Raman place. I ended up sitting next to Robert Lang, and he told me about his current plans and progress around rebuilding his house and his studio, both of which burned down earlier this year in wildfires. Everyone in the community is concerned for him and very supportive, and I must say his resilience and positive attitude are remarkable. His eyes lit up when he described how he’s going to build a new dream origami studio expressly for his needs. Of course it’ll be a couple years before it’s all done and ready to move in. Meanwhile he and Michael LaFosse made a stack of Origamido paper incorporate the ashes from his old studio and his countless lost origami models.
Sunday night was the Giant Folding contest, and I helped Marc Kirschenbaum judge the entries. More great fun and alot of very cool models.
Monday was pretty chill. Jeannie and I slept in late and arrived around noon, and went out to lunch with Eric Ma and Brian Webb. I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with John Montroll (his new collection is Gnomes, which are adorable and a ton of fun to fold!), Brian Chan, Jon Tucker and a few other people. Talked guitars and music with Marc Kirschenbaum. I successfully folded a full model of my dodecahedron. It’s definitely supercomplex and takes some time. But the layout clearly works and it all collapses nicely. All that remains to arrange to tabs for lock to close the model.
I talked to Nicholas Terry for a little while. He hasn’t been to OUSA in a few years, but he was special guest this year, coming over from France. He also asked about when I planned to publish another book, and after I explained my situation he offered to help. Wow, awesome, we’ll see if anything comes of it. In any event he won’t be back home for a few weeks. He brought his family out to the States and they’re taking a month-long vacation around the American west. Very cool.
So even as the convention recedes, I feel freshly motivated again. Hopefully that will translate into making time to do origami every week like I do for music. Designing, folding exhibit-quality instances of my models, photographing, making CPs, posting to my web site, diagraming, page and books layouts, etc. Eventually I’ll get into a rhythm and the results of my efforts will begin to accumulate.