With the right mixture, you can actually create durable sheets of gelatin and then fold them. My Jello Americans, a blog hosted by gelatin artists with impressive abilities, has a video that shows you how. Even if you don’t want to make it, be sure to check out their main page to see some amazing works.

Link -via That’s Nerdalicious!

Sending a sick person a thousand paper cranes, each one folded from a single square of paper, is a tradition that originated in Japan and has spread all over the world. Here’s the story of a little girl who helped turn it into an international phenomenon.

CHILDHOOD, INTERRUPTED

In the fall of 1954, an 11-year-old Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki came down with what her family thought was a cold …until they found large lumps on her neck and behind her ears. That was enough to terrify any parent, but Sadako’s family had a special reason to worry: They lived in Hiroshima, and and were just a mile from ground zero on August 6, 1945, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city in the closing days of World War II.

Sadako, two years old at the time of the bombing, had escaped the blast with only minor injuries. But she and her family were caught in the shower of “black rain” -radioactive fallout- as they fled the city. Now, nearly a decade later, as Sadako’s condition worsened her parent’s thoughts turned to “A-bomb disease,” the catchall name that many Japanese gave to radiation-induced illnesses. In early 1955, doctors confirmed the Sasaki’s worst fears: Sadako had leukemia, most likely caused by exposure to radiation. She had less than a year to live and needed to be hospitalized right away.

THE GIFT

Sadako’s parents could not bring themselves to tell her what was wrong or what her prognosis was. They just told her that she would have to stay in the hospital until her lumps went away.

While Sadako was living at the hospital, a group of high school students from Nagoya sent the patient a gift of senbazuru -a thousand folded paper cranes, strung together like beads on a necklace. In Japan and other Asian cultures, the crane is symbol of long life, and it is common to give paper cranes as gifts to newlyweds, to children, and to the sick. The high school students intended the cranes as a gift to the hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) at the hospital, to give them strength.

A WISH UPON A CRANE

(Image credit: Flickr user Jonathan Moreau)

Tradition also has it that when a person folds a thousand paper cranes, the mythical crane of Japanese folklore will grant a wish. Inspired by the gift, Sadako began folding her own paper cranes in the hope that the crane would grant her wish for a cure.

Paper was scarce in postwar Japan, so Sadako used whatever she could get her hands on: wrapping paper from the gifts she received, envelopes from get-well cards, notebook paper that her classmates brought when they came to visit, and even the tiny pieces of waxed paper that many of her pills were wrapped in. She cut everything into squares and folded the squares into cranes. When the squares of paper were too tiny for her to fold with her fingers, she made the folds using a straight pin.

In the eight months that Sadako lived in the hospital, she folded more than 1,300 cranes in all. She went on folding them until the middle of October 1955, when she became too ill to continue. She passed away on October 25 at the age of 12.

JOURNEY’S END

Sadako’s death was expected, but it was still a shock to her classmates, a third of whom were also survivors of the Hiroshima blast. They wanted to remember Sadako in some meaningful way, and decided to rise funds for a monument that would memorialize not just her but every child who’d been killed by the atom bombs. When they passed out leaflets at an annual meeting of junior high school principals, their local campaign grew into a national one. Many of the principals brought the idea back to their own schools and encouraged their students to get involved. Japanese newspapers and radio stations got behind the effort, and soon Sadako’s classmates had more than enough money to pay for the memorial. On May 5, 1958, just two and a half years after Sadako’s death, the Children’s Peace Monument -a bronze statue of Sadako atop a giant pedestal, her outstretched arms holding a giant folded paper crane- was dedicated in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park.

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Robert Atendido)

After the Children’s Peace Monument was dedicated, Sadako’s story began to spread beyond Japan. Over the years it has been the subject of numerous children’s books, songs, plays, and musicals, as well as film and television shows. her story is taught in schools all over the world. Many include paper crane folding as part of the instruction, and the school send the completed senbazuru to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima, where they are put on display. Today, more than a half century after the statue was dedicated, the monument still receives more than ten tons of folded paper cranes each year from children (and adults) all over the world.

CRANES FOR KUWAIT

After the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, Sadako’s story was taught in Kuwaiti schools, and the children there learned to fold paper cranes as a means of helping them deal with the trauma they experienced during the occupation. Following the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, many strands of senbazuru were left on the fence surrounding Ground Zero in a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the tragedy.

Today Sadako Sasaki’s older brother Masahiro, now in his late sixties, travels the world telling his sister’s story as a means of furthering the cause of peace. The Sasaki family long ago donated all but five of Sadako’s original cranes to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima. On the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Masahiro Sasaki presented one of the family’s five remaining cranes, folded by Sadako out of the waxed paper from one of her pills, to the WTC Visitors Center in New York. Small enough to fit on a thumbnail, the tiny red crane is on permanent display along with the senbazuru collected from the fence at Ground Zero. “I hope that by talking about the small wish for peace, the small ripple will become bigger and bigger,” Sasaki says.

(Image credit: Tribute WTC Visitors Center)

IN PERSON

If you ever visit Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, be sure to visit the Children’s Peace Monument and see the thousands of folded paper cranes on display there.  Ring the Peace Bell, another popular memorial, and visit the Peace Flame. Unlike many memorial flames, this one is not eternal: It will be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon has disappeared from Earth.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from the newest volume of the Bathroom reader series, Uncle John’s 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

In The Lord of the Rings, the Nazgûl were among the most dangerous foes our heroes encountered. Jason Ku, a mechanical engineering student at MIT, rendered a frighteningly realistic one in paper. He’s been active in the craft since the age of five and has clearly mastered it.

Link -via My Modern Met

Instructables user General Eggs has step-by-step instructions on how to make a model of the double helix. Besides a fun crafting activity, it’s a learning opportunity for biology students. Then it’s only a short step to breeding a race of genetically engineered workers.

Link -via Make

Now your traveling band will always have a Ukulele present, thanks to this folding uke kit created by Brian Chan. Inspired by origami, this DIY kit takes about half a day to build and comes in standard or mini versions.

The simplicity of the design and the way it so neatly folds into the box form is brilliant and downright convenient! So it doesn’t matter where you go, the sweet sound of the ukulele can come with.

Link –via Geekologie

Logan’s Run is a dystopia in which people live to the age of thirty, and not a day longer. On Last Day, they attend Carrousel, where they believe they re-enter the cycle of death and reincarnation. Carrousel is a lie, of course, as Logan 5 and Jessica 6 discover. Jess Hemerly is a big fan of the movie, so for her thirtieth birthday, she held a Logan’s Run-themed party. She wore a dress like the one actress Jenny Agutter wore in the movie and made this neat origami arrangement that looks like Carrousel. Check out her Flickr set at the link.

Link -via Boing Boing | Hemerly’s Website

Previously: Enormous Logan’s Run LEGO Diorama

This fist-sized beetle by Shuki Kato is ten inches across and kind of scary. Once you’re done changing your pants, check out this photo from his Flickr photostream which gives us a hint of the preparation and planning necessary to make a piece of origami this complex.

Flickr photostream -via Colossal

I love these fairy tale recreations by artists Larry Moss and Kelly Cheatle of Airigami.com. Kelly would use Photoshop to alter the images to look more 2D and Larry did the actual bending and twisting of the balloons. See more over at Environmental Graffiti.

Update: Kelly contacted me to let me know they both created the balloon sculptures.

Link

Origami Napkins – $8.95

Are you looking for a fun way to entertain your dinner guests? You need the Origami Napkins from the NeatoShop.  This fantastic pack of 40 white paper napkins is printed with 4 amazing origami patterns. The 4 origami styles include:

• Polo Shirt
• Flapping Bird
• The Bird of Paradise Flower
• And Jester’s Boot

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more unusual Party Supplies.

Link

Anja Markiewicz creates amazing, tiny works of origami. This crane was formed from a 9mm sheet of paper. Link -via Colossal | Artist’s Website (Google Translate)

Previously: The Tiny Origami of Mui-Ling Teh

I can’t find out much information about Nguyen Hung Cuong, but his origami work is simply amazing. He’s got a whole series of lovely insect pieces at the link. Link -via Colossal

Everyone recognizes M.C. Escher’s famously impossible staircases, angles that inspire confusion and wonder. His most famous works have been referenced in pop culture since forever, and now the challenge to recreate these works in three dimensions has origami artists doing incredible things with paper. A rendition of Escher’s Relativity is shown above, but Kuriositas has a gallery of others. Link

Image credit: Crackpot Papercraft

A beautiful video clip that shows tiny origami creations being unfolded on water.

Flotilla is a video of micro-origamis (2 ou 3 centimeters long) which are opening slowly onto the surface of the water by capillarity.

Constant Seige via kottke.org

Craft introduced me to a great Flickr pool called Geekigami, which is filled with well-made pieces of original origami. This piece by Flickr user -sbel- isn’t geeky, but it is neat.

Link via Craft | Flickr Pool

Japanese artist Takayuki Hori created a lovely series of origami animal figures with printed skeletons. When displayed under the right light, they look like folded x-ray images. Here’s how he does it:

each translucent sheet is first printed with either the images of fragments of an animal’s skeleton, or, on some pages, human-made discarded objects that are often ingested by the animals in the wild. using the ancient tradition of folded paper, hori assembles the pages into a three-dimensional model. once the paper is folded, the printed components are united as a whole, telling the visual story of the animal’s plight to survive in an increasingly polluted and hazardous ecosystem.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo: Design Boom

Vietnamese-American artist Giang Dinh creates wonderful paper sculptures using a wet fold origami technique. It’s hard to believe his animal creations were once a single sheet of paper! Link -via Metafilter

El Paso-based artist Isaac Salazar folds and cuts the pages of books to create word and images. Here’s the story of how he started in the craft, as told by his wife Veronica:

In 2000, we went house hunting and saw a model home that displayed some book art. They were very simple, kind of like the Readers Digest Christmas Trees, but a bit different. We loved them… so i immediately went home to make our own for the guest bedroom. We have since moved and I needed some new art for our guest bedroom when my husband asked if we can fold “WELCOME” into the book. I thought it was too complicated and told him ~ “I don’t know, why don’t you try”… and viola… he creates the masterpieces and I list & manage our Etsy shop.

Link via Dude Craft | Etsy Shop

Artist Brian Chan, who made the Iron Man Origami featured on Neatorama a while ago, also created this super awesome Batman Origami.

Take a look at his Origami page for more examples of his fantastic artwork: Link

Michael LaFosse and Richard Alexander have got one of the best shops EVAR: it’s all about origamis! Guy Kawasaki of Alltop visited Origamido Studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, and snapped some awesome photos: Link (My favorite is the mathematical origamis above) | More at Origamido’s website

German artist Frank Bölter sailed the Thames River in London in a very unusual boat: he folded a life-sized origami boat out of paper!

Named “To The World’s End”, Frank Bölter’s paper boat was part of the Drift 10 art exhibition, in London. It was created out of giant sheets of paper that he and the public at the Canary Wharf Docks folded, using origami techniques. Reinforced with metal poles, the unusual sailing craft didn’t seem to sink, and its creator was so relaxed that he laid back and read a newspaper, while the public stared at him in awe.

Oddity Central has more: Link

You’ve got an iPhone, so surely you deserve an iPhone stand that speaks of your high social status. No cheapie stand for you – so, how about one that costs $100?

Enrique Pardo explains how to make your very own origami iPhone stand out of a $100 bill (yes, technically you can also use a George Washington, but where’s the fun in that?)

Hit play or go to Link [embedded YouTube]

Best of all, you can … er, dispose of the mangled practice runs to clean yourself! Link

See also: Benjamin Toilet Paper | Word Search Toilet Paper

How can origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding be improved? Add a dash of geekery! Here’s a neat list of the geekiest origamis on the Web: Link

Who says that newspaper is out of style? Yuliya Kyrpo created this stunning dress, complete with a flowing peacock train, from 1,000 paper cranes folded from old newspapers: Link – via Inhabitat

Origami’s Hunter is a series of three lamps that look like mounted heads of a rhino, a deer, and a goat – if they were made out of origami. The lamps are a project of Chilean designer Verónica Posada of Due Amigos: Link – via Oh!Gizmo

Researchers at Harvard are trying to create programmable matter — meaning matter than can take any shape on command. At this very early stage of development, they’ve come up with a flat sheet of material that can fold into different forms:

Based on the ancient art of origami, the sheets are edged by foil actuators–thin, solid-state motors–that contract or expand when they receive an electric current from flexible electronic circuits embedded in the sheets. After they achieve their preprogrammed shape, the sheets are held in place by tiny magnets on the edges of the fold joints.

Link via Make

YouTube link.

This video provides an overview of how to make an origami hang glider, and how to propel it around a room by creating a wave of air.  The project apparently was developed as a teaching tool for students in school, but it is so “neat” that it should also appeal to adults.  Those wishing to access detailed instructions for these hang gliders (and a wide variety of other “science toys”) should visit the link below.

Science Toy Maker home page.

Origami artist Joel Cooper made the above mask, entitled Delphus, out of one sheet of elephant hide paper. It’s 16 cm tall and 5 cm deep. We last looked at his amazing works about four years ago, and he’s only added greater precision and detail to his portfolio. At the link, you can see progress photos showing how Cooper does it.

Link via Make | Artist’s Blog | Photo: Make

deviantART user orscobrusco specializes in origami. He’s put pictures of impressive pieces in his gallery, such as this cobra. It was made from a single sheet of paper with no cuts or glue. Here’s his description run through Google Translator:

Original model of the undersigned, created in ’98.
This in particular is made of paper “elephant skin” patterned wet-folding, sheet starting about two meters long. The paper has been applied to the wounded colored with a dark wood stain and ink.

Link | Gallery

Artist Won Park makes origami figures with paper currency. He made this koi fish with a one dollar bill, with no cuts, glue, or tape. The way that he arranged for a curl to serve as an eye is particularly impressive.

Link | Artist’s Gallery

Canadian artist Mui-Ling Teh makes miniature works of origami, such as this boat, which was made from a 6x10mm piece of paper. Of her work, she wrote:

I began folding my series of miniature models around the beginning of April 2008. One day I took a random strip of paper and cut a square to fold a crane out of it. I was daydreaming so I wasn’t paying attention to how small the paper was. After completing the crane I realized it was rather tiny. This is the crane I present in my piece called Born from the Hand. I only used tweezers for the last few folds. The paper size must have been about 15×15mm. After I folded that crane I decided to try folding an even smaller crane, which I present in Born from Fingers and Born from the Pinky. I also began folding various other models in miniature form. As the pieces were gettting smaller or more complex. I needed to rely on tweezers more often. The smallest work I’ve created to date was Born from the Cell which was folded from a 3×3mm piece of trace paper. However when it gets that small it becomes very difficult to take a photo of; especially with a simple point and shoot camera. Normally I fold something at a size that can be photographed for a particular concept while still being impressively small.

Link via DudeCraft | Photo: Mui-Ling Teh

Link via The Presurfer

Photo: Qiao Chang

Qiao Chang of SmugMug is a commercial photographer who creates origami figures as a hobby. One of her works takes the form of a mathematical puzzle called a Soma cube:

A solid dissection puzzle invented by Piet Hein during a lecture on Quantum Mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. There are seven soma pieces composed of all the irregular face-joined cubes (polycubes) with <=4 cubes. The object is to assemble the pieces into a cube. There are 240 essentially distinct ways of doing so (Beeler 1972, Berlekamp et al. 1982), as first enumerated one rainy afternoon in 1961 by J. H. Conway and Mike Guy.

Link via GearFuse | Soma Cube Explanation

I’m a big fan of papercraft artist Yumiko Matsui (featured before on Neatorama here) – so it was a pleasant surprise to hear from her about this Neatoramabot papercraft sculpture. Ain’t he cute?

If you haven’t seen Yumiko’s artwork before, you owe it to yourself to check it out: she sculpts fantastic and colorful dioramas as well as miniature characters out of paper. The level of details is simply superb (for example, in her Summer Festival series, check out the Japanese pancake stand)

Best of all, I hear she’s coming to the United States! Here’s Yumiko’s online art gallery: Link

Junior Fritz Jacquet is a paper artist unlike any other: his medium of choice is the cardboard core of a toilet paper roll!

Village of Joy has the gallery – via Reality Carnival | Junior’s website (no links, strangely) and portfolio (PDF)

Origami, the age-old discipline of folding paper into amazing figures, has its own masters, and as this post demonstrates, these geniuses can truly transform paper into any form they desire.

Origami – the traditional Japanese art of paper folding – is something that a geek could really get into. It’s all about visual math, and problem-solving, but with that artistic nuance as well. The origami artists below came up with some very cool designs, which we can definitely appreciate – so check them out!

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geeksaresexy.

Only the geekiest of papercraft projects made the cut for this excellent list from oobject. Take a look at what happened when geeks get their hands on construction paper:

Whether a novice or a paper-folding master, papercraft is a hobby that anyone can enjoy. It involves printing out a custom schematic with instructions and folding the paper to create a unique work of art. The papercraft you see here keep central with the theme of geekiness and quite possibly, nerdiness.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by vveneziani.

The Origami Crane Lamp is a chandelier by Michele Varian, a New York-based fashion designer and interior decorator. It measures 58″ long is lit fluorescently.

Link via Nerd Approved

Kusudama is an ancient Japanese form of paper folding which is still practiced today.  As time passed the form evolved in to something that looks similar to origami but has a very different set of rules.

Quazen has some great pictures of both Kusudama and modular origami, into which it evolved:

The form of Kusudama goes back to before written history. The general consensus is that they were used to hold bunches of herbs or flowers as urban culture
took hold. With urbanization the desire for objects with both utility and beauty took greater hold. Before this the plants would have been hung on their own and the kusudama evolved as an aesthetically pleasing receptacle for both potpourri and incense.

Link – via webphemera

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

Link

Yumiko Matsui is a Japanese artist specializing in fantastic dioramas made out of paper. This one is of the Dotonbori Street in Osaka:

Dotonbori is one of Osaka’s main shopping areas and entertainment districts, and is also known as a food destination. It is a popular tourist destination. It is famous for big cheesy neon signs on the street. Those signs become part of the culture of Osaka. Dotonbori street gets busier at night because of the lights.

Check out the gallery here: Link – Thanks Yumiko!