ORIGAMI WEAVING: PART 5

The weaving piece is complete. It's been an interesting experiment.




I rotated the central diamonds for some added interest.

The back of the piece is interesting in itself.

The prototype model is very tight and getting the last few strips together was tricky. There were a few minor tears. Sections of the wider strips buckled.

The result is a piece which is not entirely "square".

I covered the piece with a damp paper towel and ironed it. (See the last photo for the result of this procedure.) This helped, but did not entirely fix the problem. A side effect is that the shape of the underlying locking diamonds showed through on the front in several places. If you look carefully at the photo at full resolution you may be able to spot this.






The next version would benefit from a few modifications which might fix this. The narrow strips, which are made from standard letter-sized copy paper, would benefit from being a fraction narrower and longer to allow for the thickness of the folded paper in the wider strips. This would provide a little more ease of adjustment.



I still do not like the colors and am considering painting the whole piece with a bronze Pearl-Ex wash in an attempt to tie the colors together and give it a sheen which will lift the flatness of the copy paper.










I got a shipment of differently colored (and rare) legal sized copy paper today. This means that my next copy paper version will use colors I like better. I am also considering printing leaf, bark or crumpled patterns on the sheets before I fold them in order to provide the illusion that I am using expensive hand-made paper with "inclusions" or "texture". Although they provide visual interest, these extras often make the paper difficult to fold accurately.

Another possibility is using printed kraft paper gift wrap. This type of wrap is stronger than the usual gift wrap and generally does not suffer from color cracking on the crease marks.