Practicing origami

A day with lots of folding: much, even most, of it going over some technical folds to get used to doing them. In particular, I made a first attempt at a troublewit: this was a device used by magicians/performers to amuse an audience: it has a bunch of cleverly designed pleated folds built in, and can be quickly and deftly twisted into a series of different shapes.
It needs to be folded from stiff-ish paper or thin card, and it needs to be pretty large (the illustrations of it show pieces a couple of feet long or more) and all I had was a sheet of letter paper: but it was easy enough to fold that I think that I need to find a nice sheet of stiffer paper and give it a try. Perhaps bookbinding paper would do: and that would give me a nice excuse to visit the craft store on the square.

The other technical-but-beautiful fold which I attempted for the first time today was a Kawasaki rosebud. This is built on a very-tricky-until-you-get-the-trick fold, the square twist, which is a lovely device of which I have, right now, no photos. I'm planning on trying to take some pictures of this in development at some time and will post them here then.
Anyway, the first test version turned out rather well, once I figured out the rather cryptic diagrams: as always with this sort of thing, once you get it, it turns out to be so much easier than you were making it seem before.
And the book it is in has the rather lovely title of Roses, Origami and Math.

Yours, still learning,
N.

Yours