Secret bird

Shh...

The Secret Bird is designed by the delightfully whimsical Jeremy Shafer, and can be found in his book Origami to Astonish and Amuse as the "Bird of Peace Pop-up Card".  This model was folded from a 10-inch square of brown origami paper.

Thing

Unit origami is a fun and creative pursuit. Oftentimes, units can be assembled in different ways. So you can create a different object based on how many units you have and how you assemble them. Consider the object below.


What is it exactly? I'm not sure. But it certainly is something.


This figure is made up of 24 identical units. Each unit was formed from one 3"x6" blue rectangle and one 3"x6" gold rectangle, folded together. The units were then assembled into the final form. It took me something like 3 hours and 45 minutes to create the rectangles (by ripping squares in half) and fold and assemble the units. I found this to be startlingly relaxing.

The pattern for the units may be found in Floral Origami Globes by Tomoko Fusè ("Alternate Fixes / Type II"... what does that mean?). I adapted the assembly instructions from a different part of the same book ("24-unit structure").

Cuboctahedron

This fancy fellow is a geometric figure known as a cuboctahedron. It is an example of a subset of origami known as unit origami, in which the folder creates many identical units (each from a single sheet of paper) and assembles them into a whole. Unit origami is ideally suited for realizing polyhedra (three-dimensional mathematical figures).

This cuboctahedron is constructed of 24 individual units (3 each of 8 different colors), each folded from a 6" square of origami paper. Folding patterns for each unit may be fond in the excellent book Unit Origami by Tomoko Fusè, under the name "Open Frame I — Bow-Tie Motif". Assembling units into various polyhedra is left as an exercise for the reader.

Thanks to the always-amazing Cafe Zing! for providing space for folding and photography.