Feliz no cumpleaños

I wanted to finish my present before saturday but it's too late now.
Here you can see the pieces I have so far to build the origami mobile I´m planning to give myself.

The search for the omega star...

has ended after 13 months!

Approximately one year ago I discovered an origami omega star sitting on the top of the computer in my new office. I asked my colleges who had done it, but they told the star had been there for months now and nobody knew anymore who had folded it to begin with. As I was in the visitors room (reserved for visiting scientists or students staying less than 6 months), they told me that everything on the desk now belonged to me and that I could take the star home if I wanted to. I (as a shy intern) didn't dare to take it with me at the beginning. Instead I looked at it in detail when I was not working trying to figure out how it was folded. Of course, I looked all over the internet for the diagram and although I managed to find some pictures of the finished star, I wasn't able to find out neither the diagram nor the author.

When the internship ended I took the star home and left another unit origami piece there in return. In order to investigate how the units were put together I began to unfold it. However, my brilliant idea only resulted in the damaging of the units.

With the time my obsession with the star wore off. But yesterday, when looking for other origami diagrams, I found a video with the folding instructions for the so called "omega star", MY star.
The video was linked to a nice origami blog, where I even found the diagram!

It turns out that neither the unit folding, not the putting the units together is difficult at all. The only problem is the last step when the star shape is formed and where very careful folding is required. I've made two of these stars today...with far from perfect results. But like everything in this life, it is a matter of practice and soon I'll manage to fold one perfectly.

In the picture are the three stars. The one in the middle is the original one, which I even managed to repair.

How to kill an origami?

Tomoko Fuse once wrote some words about origami fate and how she sometimes burns origami that has proven “unsuccessful.” I’ve had a couple of unsuccessful encounters with unit origami myself, but most of those unfinished pieces ended in the paper trash, putting a little color into it after being crushed by my frustrated hands. But this piece was different. I was proud to have started to venture myself in the world of equilateral triangles, which are not easy units to fold. I had some difficulties at the beginning, but after figuring out how to fold them I constructed a piece with them. A cuboctahedoron, which looked pretty well but resulted very unstable. I started to replace some of the faulty pieces and ended replacing the entire set of triangles. But even then my cube wasn’t stable enough.

I forgot about it for some time, but today I started to join the pieces again while my code was compiling.

In the hope that a smaller and more compact geometry would be more stable, this time I just constructed an octahedron. But once again the units did not hold together stably. It would be difficult to find a better example of a truly “unsuccessful” origami and so just throwing it into the garbage would be somehow undignifying.

I went to the kitchen and got the matches, ready to enjoy the color flames promised by my book and remembering nostalgically my first inorganic chemistry practical course and the flame-tests bright colors.

However…my origami refused to go in flames the first time…and the second…and the third.

It even started to look more interesting, gaining some personality of its own by loosing its geometrical perfection (its apparent perfection of course…the lack of it was what started this whole thing on the first place).

After a while, the smoke was starting to kill me instead of the origami and I decided to stop and take the smoking octahedron to the balcony.

There it will rest and hopefully the rain or the snow will end with it soon, before I take it back and surrender to its imperfection and willingness to survive.