Shell Ginger

I took the picture of the real shell ginger shown below at the San Diego Zoo this summer. Since then, I have been pondering ideas for designing an origami version. My idea was to start at the corner and arrange circles in concentric rings from there - the resulting base seemed needlessly difficult to pre-crease since the axial folds were all at different angles. I decided to use concentric wedges instead, and the axial creases magically lined up. Not only that, but the vast majority of hinge creases for the gusset molecules come from neighboring rabbit ear molecules. Even though this drastically simplified the pre-creasing process, this was still an extremely complex and time consuming model.

Design date: October, 2009

Paper used: A single un-cut square of mulberry tissue paper treated with methyl cellulose.