Friday, February 4, 2011

Pleated Bird

This model was easily the hardest so far. It was ten steps with the last step made up of at least five more mountain/valley folds. I had a very hard time with it and ended up with my own unique model. I could not figure out how to do what the diagram explained, so I improvised. It is close, but not quite right. The paper was about to tear, so I had to finish. At least fifteen minutes on this one. Looking at the photo again, I like my version better than the instructions.

1 comment:

  1. I struggled with this one too, at first. But now I love folding it. It's easy to follow the instructions up until you unfold everything, then the instructions seem to fail you. It took me several tries with several sheets of paper before I could fold it cleanly.
    -First make sure that you thoroughly crease every fold in the first steps. Since the paper ends up being four sheets thick, you need to press hard to make a clear crease through each layer.
    -Next, after you unfold, orient the sheet such that the tail is pointing at you and the beak away, with the center crease running from tail to peak as a valley (this will be a top view of the bird).
    -Now, the trick is to invert certain fold segments, making some valleys into mountains or vice-versa with pushing and pinching the paper. Some fold segments you leave alone. I like to start with the longest zig-zagging crease of the wingspan, which you want to make all valleys. This means making two mountain segments into valleys by pushing and pinching the individual folds.
    -Then moving up to the second longest zig-zag wingspan crease: these need to all be mountains.
    -The third longest zig-zag: valleys again.
    -The shortest (at the beak): mountains.
    -Almost there: now you need to invert some of the straight line crease segments that go from from the tail and intersect at the end of the beak. The middle crease goes valley-mountain-small valley-mountain-valley. And the two side creases go mountain-valley-small mountain-valley-mountain.
    -Finally, you grab the two wings and collapse the whole bird. Then lay it on its side, giving all the creases a good strong press.
    -Voila!

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