Several weeks ago, the staff of Taro’s Origami Studio were approached for an odd challenge.  A client had an old grainy photo of a past project, and they asked us to recreate it.  Closer insception found that these were some kind of origami flower, but to solve the case, we needed more info.

1: Testing

Closer inspection of the photo found that these were some kind of origami flower upside down inside a funnel.  It took a bit to figure out exactly which one, but they appear to be iris flowers.  We test folded a traditional iris to see if it would work, but the angle was too shallow.  For the next round we actually folded the same model out of a pentagon to provide 5 petals instead of 4 and that certainly helped.

The client gave us the green light, but to actually fold the series of hero models we’d need another data point; one of the funnels.

2: MODEL PRODUCTION

Once we got a sample funnel in the mail, it became clear what to do.  In order to get the iris to fit, 5 petals was a bit too little, but 6 was a bit too big, so we needed a way to halve the distance.  For that we fit a sqauch fold inside the origami flower to both stretch and lock it into place.

From there, the model ended up looking great but was a bit too large, so we had to shrink the size of the hexagon from the start.  After some small back and forth adjustments, the model fit perfectly under the funnel and we were on to production.

In all, the client requested 15 models, which took about 2 hours of folding to complete.  The models were made out of our Taro’s Origami standard Kami paper.  And while they were each quite fun to fold, the real joy was stacking them all up!