About

I first got into origami in grade school; my family went to a New Year's Festival in Japantown, and someone was demonstrating how to fold origami cranes. I took the crane home and unfolded and refolded it dozens of times until I could fold a new one on my own. My parents took notice and bought me a few origami books to get started. It remained mostly a passing hobby throughout school, mostly just folding and refolding the models I had already learned.

When I first started my tech career out of college, I wanted to make something nice for my coworkers for Christmas, and hit upon the idea of folding origami ornaments for them. This became a yearly tradition that continued up until the pandemic (when no one was in the office so delivering ornaments became impractical.) That got me back into the hobby. I also discovered modular origami (primarily kusudama) and began to extensively explore and fold these types of models more seriously. Some of these models were folded in the office and left in various nooks and crannies for people to discover.

In 2024, I discovered tessellations. The mathematics and repetition were similar to the reasons why I liked modular origami so much, so I began to learn and explore these models as well.

While much of my learning and models comes from books, I have started using YouTube as a resource for patterns, tutorials, and even just general concepting. Although I never formally studied Japanese, I picked up enough from informal study via anime/manga/video games (and working in Japan for a year) that I can reasonably understand written Japanese. This allowed me to expand my library to include a broader variety of books, and to follow instructions from Japanese YouTubers.