Star Light Star Bright

So the story behind this little guy goes as follows. In November I was visiting a couple of friends in San Francisco. They knew I enjoyed origami and had found a cool little paper shop aptly named The Paper Tree in Japantown. Instead of purchasing half the store and have to haul it on the plane, I limited myself to only a handful of items. One of these items was a pack of 6 sheets of glow in the dark paper. If you know anything about me, you'll know I love shiny things. I couldn't pass it up. But with only 6 sheets, 3 green and 3 pink, what could I make? Since I've had so my practice making tiny modular pieces, being the frugal paper hoarder I am, I decided to try a 30 unit piece from Tomoko Fuse's Floral Origami Globes. This is the Rhombic Patches / Type 3.

The unique twist to most the modules in this book is that each unit consist of 2 sheet of paper folded together. On top of this, one of the sheet is a 2:1 ratio, i.e. not square, and the other is of varying size depending on the unit and acts as an accessory. Up till now I was afraid of using paper that was too small as the accessory piece can have some complicated folds. But if I wanted to get 30 even 2:1 ratio sheets out of 2 sheets of paper I'd have to get over that fear quickly. Fortunately the glow in the dark paper would be the 2:1 ratio piece and was easy to fold. Unfortunately, the black accessory piece ended up being SUPER tiny. I believe I managed to get all 30 pieces I needed out of one 6" sheet of paper WITH paper left over. Each black sheet was half an inch by an inch or something absurd like that. And that was BEFORE folding it! So it was challenging. Everything finally came together and the entire globe is small. It is roughly 1 3/4 inches in diameter.

But it's pretty boring under normal light. Since it's glow in the dark paper I figured it would be it's own illumination. So this photo is a minute long exposure under pitch black conditions after "charging" the paper up. If you didn't know, ultra-violet light super charges any glow in the dark material in a fraction of a second. Using my black light I got one side more charged than the other so things wouldn't look quite so flat. I also sat it on a sheet of white paper so the glow would reflect off, which worked well.

Over all I'm very pleased with the model and the photograph. I hope you like it as much as I do!