Learn to Fold

If this will soon be your first time folding or you haven’t folded in a while, don’t worry! We have provided a flowchart for you to follow so that you can become acquainted with the basics of folding origami.

 

Step 1: Obtain a square piece of paper

You don’t need origami paper for this. In fact, the bigger the square, the easier it will be for you to fold your piece. If you are using a letter size sheet (8.5″ x 11″), fold along the diagonal and cut the excess rectangle strip as shown below.

How to Cut a Square from a Rectangle

 

Step 2: Fold something Easy on Youtube

This will be especially helpful if you have never folded anything before. Search up something you would like to make on YouTube with the word “easy” included in the search. Find a video of around three minutes and fold along with the instructor, pausing as many times as necessary. Excellent examples to start with include a paper airplane (uses rectangle paper), a boat, a ninja star, a butterfly, or a heart (shown below).

 

Step 3: Learn the folds

Once you have had experience with a few easy origami models, it will help you progress if you understand the various kinds of folds in origami. This link from Origami.Me is an excellent resource to understand and practice with them. All folds after the rabbit-ear fold require that you start with a square base. Henry Pham, an origamist on YouTube, also offers a video detailing the different kinds of folds if you prefer a more visually detailed orientation (see below).

 

Step 4: Fold, Fold, Fold!

Believe it or not, this hermit crab designed by Satoshi Kamiya, one of the top contributors to the field of origami in the 21st century, can be folded with the same folds you have learned thus far. As such, the journey from a crane to something like Kamiya’s Hermit Crab requires tremendous patience and repetition of techniques to origami pieces that interest you.  Although it may sound iterative, each origami model is unique in its sequence of folds from a square to its finished state.

origami instructions art and craft ideas: complex origami

We recommend you to either use YouTube (convenient, economical) or that you borrow/buy origami books from local libraries and bookstores. With YouTube, there is much more freedom to explore what you want to fold and you also have the benefit of watching a person fold live, making it easy to replicate. Below are some channels which have significantly contributed to origami on YouTube, as well as the difficulty of folding what they teach.

 

Step 5: Spread the joy of folding

Once you build competency and amass a potpourri of paper figures, share what you fold or teach family and friends to spread the joy of folding!