Sometimes Life's Just a Five-Sided Square

Sunday, 14 June 1998

I've been trading email back and forth with Mimi for the past year or so, on something of an intermittent basis, since she's often too busy to check her mail. After a month of not getting a reply, I sent her a postcard a couple weeks back with a haiku on it and a small, vaguely Japanese-style watercolor pencil drawing (a risky medium, considering that she lives in oh-so-moist Seattle). It did occur to me that I might be establishing a perverse incentive system, but it did get a reply out of her.

She sent me a short letter written on cardstock, with a drawing of a dragon on the reverse, and cut into puzzle shapes. This is the sort of thing we used to do when we were in college; I think I once sent her a multi-page letter to which I'd given the puzzle treatment, but I'd cut the pages together, so that each page was made up of the same shaped pieces. I don't remember what she did to me by way of revenge.

Anyway, I wrote a reply last night on both sides of a 10-inch (25.4 cm) square of origami paper, and I've been hunting through my books looking for a good shape to fold it into. Unfortunately, I can't find at least half of my origami books. The ones I can find are one (in Japanese, so I can't give the title) that contains a lot of complex three-dimensional models that use long rectangles of paper, and Animal Origami for the Enthusiast by John Montroll, which starts out with patterns that are too simple and ends with patterns that are too hard. Some in the middle look just right, which is good teaching technique, if bad fairy-tale form.

The pattern that caught my eye was the starfish (pg. 21-23), which is built upon Montroll's "five-sided square" base. This isn't an oxymoron; it's an origami base that gives you something like a square of paper with an extra fold sticking up out of it. It lets you make five-limbed models while traditional bases have four limbs. Very clever, but unfortunately I can't seem to get past the opening steps. The five-sided square starts off with a very difficult fold that isn't well described in the book; something like "fold this here, and that there, and then if this point matches that point proceed, otherwise start over," with no basis given for just where the first fold needs to be made. I searched through the rec.arts.origami archives to see if perhaps they contained some useful exchange along the lines of "How do you fold this fershlugginer five-sided square," "Oh, just make the first fold such-and-such percentage of the distance in from the corner," but I didn't see anything like that. I've subscribed to the group, though, and may post the question there myself at some point, but I don't expect that I'd get an answer back tonight (Interport's sluggish news server pretty much guarantees that), and I want to send the letter to Mimi tomorrow.

After wrecking three sheets of paper (of course I was testing the pattern out on scratch paper first; I'm not stupid), I tried Montroll's tyrannosaurus pattern (pg. 31-32). This worked out, though it was somewhat bulky to send through the mail. I think I'll try the brontosaurus (no, not "apatosaur"), and if that's too bulky, maybe the owl.

The brontosaurus turned out to have an undocumented step in its construction, a common flaw in Montroll books. I nearly wimped out and just made a simple crane, but wound up going with the tyrannosaurus. It came out pretty well, though I still have my doubts about it going through the mail. Chris thinks it'll be OK. I'm also worried about whether I might have creased the letter into illegibility. Talking about it on the web like this will ruin the surprise for Mimi if she reads this, but I don't think she's in the habit of reading my website, so I should be safe.

Man, that tyrannosaurus has a lot of little folds. Parts of it must be 30-40 layers thick. I sometimes think that John Montroll has access to a parallel universe where paper doesn't have thickness.