Erik Demaine's Folding and Unfolding:

Fold-and-Cut Examples

How To Print

1. You can use your webbrowser to print the images at 72 dpi. The lines will be grainy, but printing this way is the easiest.
2. To get higher quality, save one of the high-resolution images (150 dpi or 300 dpi) to a file, open it with an image viewer, and print it scaled down to fit to the page.
3. To get prefect quality, use the PDF or Encapsulated PostScript versions. Print to fill the entire page. If you don't know how to print these files with your printer, see my information on file formats.

How To Fold

• Bold lines are the desired cuts. Usually these lines are solid, and you should not fold along them.
• The thin outside rectangle is intended to be the boundary of the paper. After printing, you can cut the paper to those limits, although this is mostly unnecessary.
• The dashed lines are "valley" folds, and should be folded "towards" you.
• The dot-dashed lines are "mountain" folds, and should be folded "away" from you.
• Some of the examples have a middle line of symmetry. Mountain fold along such a line before you do anything (including precreasing).

1. Print the crease pattern as large as possible, and possibly also photo-enlarge using a photocopier onto larger paper.
2. Precrease all the creases (dashed and dot-dashed) by pinching the paper and making sure that you follow along the printed lines. This may get your hands a little dirty with toner.
3. Reverse the valley (dashed) creases, so that all crease have their proper orientation.
4. Now the hard part: collapse all the creases simultaneously. This can take some practice, especially on the harder examples, but with some effort you should be able to get it.

Straight Skeleton Method

MIT Logo

Thanks to Nina Strohminger for finding a good folding of this model.

Swan

Angelfish

Butterfly

Fancy Star

G4G5, prepared for the 5th Gathering for Martin Gardner

Jackolantern (make out of orange paper!)

Entire Tangram Set from a Square