The East Bay Origami Convention

this year had the theme, “Impossible”, so I decided to stay thematic by teaching an “Impossible” origami model. Of course, I didn’t have any such model pre-designed, so my pre-convention challenge was to design a thematic model that could be taught to a mixed level audience in no more than 1 hour.

One of my early thoughts was to design an origami version of the impossible triangle illusion, but I quickly decided that that had already “been done” sufficiently. However, this got me to thinking about various illusions and impossible figures. Possibly my favorite classic illusion is the Rubin’s Vase or Face-Vase illusion, so it’s not surprising that I ended up with the Rubin’s Vase as my model.

Origami Rubin's Vase
Origami Rubin’s Trophy Cup

Folded out of gold or silver foil, it resembles a trophy cup, hence my final name for the model, the “Rubin’s Trophy Cup”. When folding out of foil, it is also possible to add some nice rounding to the cup.

Other exciting notes from EBOC 2013, include having my fox finger puppet model published in the convention book (the very first time I have ever published origami diagrams), meeting Janessa Munt, and having my non-origamist boyfriend win the scavenger hunt challenge.

The official convention website is here: http://calorigami.berkeley.edu/eboc.html and the official convention pictures are here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/2449839@N22/ 

 

Math Monday

is a neat blog of cute math-y things jointly posted by the Make: Online and the Museum of Mathematics. I’ve had an ongoing dream of having some of my stuff be cool enough to be featured in one of their posts, but I apparently also don’t read them enough, because it seems that my Seeing Stars sculpture was featured in October and I only just noticed now.

See their post on polyhedral models (including mine!) at Bridges here: http://momath.org/home/math-monday-plenty-of-polyhedra/ or here: http://makezine.com/magazine/plenty-of-polyhedra/

Seeing Stars photo from Math Monday
Seeing Stars photo from Math Monday