UPDATE: read on for an exciting development :)

This weekend I intend to become an Origami brown-belt.

I've always held it that, in art at least, you should not do anything except for yourself. There's no point to grades, praise or fame if you're not enjoying it. I've taught myself to draw, to fold, to play and while the adulation is nice, it's purely for my own joy. Generally I am not ambitious. But there always comes a point where I want to prove I'm good among my peers. Not real peers - you're not gonna catch me jetting off to Origami conventions just yet. Just to try and achieve something that I know, within the field, is very challenging. It's not like it means anything more, it's just for my own personal satisfaction.

With the piano, it was the point I started playing Beethoven. Never mind that I'd been playing Chopin for years, and that he is arguably far more challenging - I wanted to play Beethoven! It's an aim I still haven't quite completed - my arms are too weak to do a whole sonata. This is the one I want to play:



Also, I adore Evengy Kissin. I feel sure that I would be a better pianist if I had huge gingery hair that bopped as I played. I had made it Chopin's Fantasie Impromtu, but I am way way off being able to even touch it, so maybe that will be my next landmark.

I've been in an origami blitz for a few weeks now, and I have been impressing even myself. Despite that, I am not very good at it - I'm not neat or patient, and a lot of the things I fold would embarass other people who knew what they were talking about. Origami truly is an art that is less complicated than it looks - this, for example, was very simple to fold once I got my brain around what it was doing. Yes that's one piece of paper, and yes it does bounce like a spring if you pull the ends. So as my origami challenge, I thought I'd have a bash at making Robert Lang's cuckoo clock.

A little background. Before Robert Lang came along, origami models were rated from Simple to Complex. Afterwards they had to invent a whole new catagory - Supercomplex - just to accomodate the leaps he invented. He was the first Westerner ever to be invited to speak at the Japanese origami society, and he's helped out on space missions using his origami know-how. Part of the glee of all this was his mathematical approach - he's invented computer programs which help distribute the model across the paper. For example, if you want to fold a bird it has four points - a head, a tail and two wings. Conveniently, a piece of paper has four points too, so folding one is fairly simple. If you want to do a Samuri Helmet beetle with six legs and three prongy bits, working out how to do that is a little trickier. Nowadays it can be worked out theoretically by computer.

(While we're talking about the amount of points that can be got out of one piece of paper, take a look at my favourite origami piece of all time. And no, even with the crease pattern, I can't comprehend how he did it either. Fans of Studio Ghibli might also enjoy the Catbus, though I'm more mystified by the comment "base is not box pleated. I only learnt how to box pleat yesterday, and my first reaction was "Oh! It looks like the Catbus!". So how did he do it?)

So. All I have done for the last two days is fold. Here's a picture of the finished product.

They don't call it Super-Complex for nothing. Merely attempting it has blown my mind. As I mentioned, I've learnt a new technique - the box pleat - which is basically a way of making lots of legs out of a regular piece of paper. The Cuckoo Clock requires you to start with a minumum size of 160cm x 16 cm, though mine is a little larger than that. Pre-creasing - putting folds on a flat piece of paper so when you start folding properly, all the lines are in the right place and the paper does what you want it to do - took me two hours. I went to bed, thoroughly exhausted. When you are working with over a metre of paper, you actually have to move an awful lot. The next day I worked solid from 10 in the morning until about 7 at night. For the first time ever, I understood why Serious Origami Masters use pegs when they are working. AND I AM ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH. Though admittedly, realising I had to refold half of it because I'd done it the wrong way around was something of a blow - as was refolding the middle section three or four times as it fell to pieces (that's when I got the pegs...) Last night, I stopped at fold number 113 - there are 216 folds in all - and the room stunk of stress. So far I am on the right track, but I'll be so disappointed if it reaches a point where I get stuck. It does happen fairly often when I attempt serious folding

If I manage to do it? It looks like my clock will be the size of two matchboxes. So if I succeed, I'm gonna do another one for my room. Twice the size and in expensive red-and-white paper. Wish me luck folks.

UPDATE: And it is done! Ultimately, I think it took me 12 hours - which is pathetic when you consider the pinnacle of origami achievement was folded in only 40. I confess to cheating a little on the penultimate step. A section I had to continually refold ultimately turned out to be very important, and because I'd screwed up the flaps which attatched front to back didn't really work. So I used six spots of glue to do what my misshapen flaps couldn't, on the basis that this was the fold that would break the model if it didn't work. The thing is, I can do it. Not very well, but well enough to give it another bash in a week's time and attempt to produce some art.

Last night I dreamed about parties. One in a wooden hall, with bay windows overlooking a huge lake and the sea - one on a boat with my extended family - one in the backstreets of what might have been France. I don't usually dream about going to parties, so what is my brain trying to tell me? Freudian dream analysis in the comments please.


Finally, I've got my first partner for Swap-bot. She lives in Tokyo! She has a five month old daughter, hates Disney and loves dark chocolate. Rather intimidatingly, the person who is sending me an Art Card is the coordinator of the swap - from Missouri, a fan of good cinema, piano music and Josh Groban. So damn cool...