Recycled Origami

Making pretty things from discarded print receipts

Published

September 5, 2011

Unit origami is beautiful. You can make dozens of simple modules and turn them into stunning 3D creations. I thought it would be hard to fold anything at college till I found that every print job released through the university gave you a cover sheet. People would recycle these sheets (easily a hundred a day) and I would collect some and use them to make the pieces pictured above. It became a nice way to spend an afternoon over the summer or during some downtime. It is quite meditative to make the units and I would leave the completed pieces around the library on campus as well as various other places.

I easily did this with several hundred cover sheets over the years. I would leave them and in a day or two they would disappear. There is only one that is still in the library: in the IT Center on the 1st floor of Mugar Library, on top of a cabinet, sits a Sonobe piece, occasionally sharing the space with a Jack O’Lantern. Whatever happened to the rest, I hope people enjoyed them. It is certainly prettier than a lump of sheets in a recycling bin.

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