An Origami Book

At the HBAG open workshop meeting this week, Ping showed me how to make this cool little origami book. As will be obvious momentarily, I'm not a professional origami instruction writer, but you might be able to figure it out ;-) [Note: If you can't see the pictures, forget it.... The words alone will absolutely not be sufficient!]

The finished book has eight pages, and two "secret" four-page spreads (the insides of the regular pages).

Start with a square piece of paper. Fold it in fourths, and then cut half of the paper in fourths, perpendicular to the folds. (These flaps will be the pages.) Make diagonal folds in the part you didn't cut. That gives you a page that looks something like this:

Now fold the bottom section up

and the top flaps down.

Fold the right and left sides in to the center.

Now you have to do what I think of as a typical origami move (sounds impossible and doesn't make a bit of sense til you've done it). There is a sort of pocket on each side of the bottom front section, and you have to tuck it in behind.

Here's the pocket

and where you're tucking to

and what it looks like when you're done.

Now you're going to fold the pages down into their correct orientation. Start with the left set of pages. Fold them down

and flip them back.

Then the same thing on the right side.

Now just fold on the spine, and you're done :-)

Finally, here are pics of a template that shows which pieces end up where, and sketches of the process which may or may not make more sense than the narrative above....

Good luck :-)