FLOWER TOWER POWER

I honestly don't remember the last time I was this excited about origami. A fair point would be that, yes, I haven't actually done much in the past few months (or at least as much as I should be!). Last night though, I had a little spree after coming across this video... I first saw Chris Palmer make his Flower Tower a few years ago in Between the Folds (go watch, it's pure magic) and since then scoured the interwebs to see how I could make one myself. Christ Palmer himself said that there was no way he'd be making a diagram of the steps anytime soon because of certain *stressful* steps involved (see video below). But, obviously, Youtube did what it does best, and delivered me a tutorial by the man himself. And I cried a bit. Then made it.

Firstly, here's the clip from Between the Folds of the master creating one himself, explaining his way through it and what makes the design special. So you can see just why I was so into this thing... I highly recommend at least watching 2:40, where you can understand the weird and stressful 'crunch' this piece has to go through to become the beautiful geometric thing it is.

"I'm folding something on something that's already folded and then I'm re-aranging it and putting it back in a different position where some things are released that were trapped inside."

Honestly, I don't even feel like I'm doing it justice but anyways... After an hour of fiddling with paper and letting out yelps of excitement - she is born (she's a girl for some reason). Another piece I've always wanted to make checked off my list.

Here's the Flower:

And here's the Tower:

So it's still my first attempt and it's a bit rough around the edges - but you get it right? I'm going to get my hands on some bigger and more appropriate (sturdier) paper which will probably yield to a much nicer result. But you can still get the gist of it - the dodecagons stacked up on each other which can either pop up to create the 'tower' or collapse to create the 'flower'. Yeah, I love it. A lot. Clever, clever, clever.