Creativity Journal - Day 19 (floating)

Create something that floats on water. (It doesn't have to be a boat.)

I was thinking about this challenge last week, while sitting in my car in the car wash. All the water around obviously went with the floating theme. I tried to work out how to fold an origami boat with my receipt but failed miserably. I just ended up with a piece of paper with dozens of criss-crossed folder lines.

All the emotional dramas of being unemployment (or well under-employed) got in the way of life last week and I never quite got around to researching my origami. I finally did it the other night, and finally now I'm posting the results.

I won't post the instructions, mainly because there's lots of resources on the web already. I'll just send you to the two sites I used.

The first site was for a simple sail boat - Origami-Instructions.com.

One comment: I used my receipts and I found that the 'sail' must remain taller than the sides when you're folding. That is, when you get the instruction "Now fold each edge of the paper upwards as shown.  Use your fingers to open up into a hat!  You can stop at the hat, or continue on to the boat." the centre points must be above the edges you are folding up. Using receipts, which a long and thin, I sometimes had to fold in the extra length.

The second site was for a long thin boat. I thought this style would work better for my receipts, particularly the family grocery bill. The site I found was origami.wonderhowto.com.

I had a little bit of difficulty following the end of the video. I sometimes think these sort of instructional videos would be best done with the video over the person's shoulder. That way, non-spatial people like myself, aren't trying to tie our brains into knots working out which way around things go. The main thing that I missed at the end is that the very last step, after all the folding is complete (from about 1:47 in the video) actually involves turning the entire boat inside out.

If you look closely in this photo, you'll notice that my long boat is not very secure - because I didn't turn it inside out. I was watching the video on my phone and just couldn't make it out.

The next day I tried again, watching it on a bigger screen, with a some what squarer piece of paper.

I refolded my original receipt boat and tried them all out in the water. Result - some receipts make great boats because the paper is waxy; others are very thin and take on water quite quickly.

The wonderful thing about both these boats is that they only involve about five or six sets of folds (and the magical turn inside trick for the long boat). They're really easy to learn and memorise. I can see it being a useful "magical aunty" sort of trick for visits to parks and ponds - IF you put all your 'dead' boats in the bin so they don't feed birds :-(

Not fabric related, although I was thinking so stiff serviettes could be folded into the long boat for cutlery sets at a dinner party. Not word related, although I used printed paper. But definitely not clutter creating, because I used paper destined for the bin.