DofTNet Origami

About DofTNet Origami

Storytime, kids!

In the beginning...

DofT is often asked how he got into origami. Like many children, he would sometimes do fun things with paper and would occasionally come across some instructions in a magazine or some other thing or would learn how to fold things like fortune tellers and ninja stars from other kids he went to school with. It was an occasional passtime, but not much more than that.

So what happened?

DofT spent several years working for a major computer company doing tech support so he spent several hours each day tied to his desk with a short leash.. er.. phone cord. Since his job consisted mostly of talking people through fixing their computer problems, he had very little to do with his hands and would often fiddle with little scraps of paper.

One year around Christmas, his team decided to do a secret santa gift exchange. The guy who drew DofT's name had noticed the scrap fiddling and so he bought an origami page-a-day calendar. The idea is that you use the previous day's page to fold the current day's origami.

Most of it was pretty basic and since DofT didn't really need a calendar to keep track of the days he would just fold through several days at once. By mid-January, he was well into June in the calendar.

Origami Explosion

Around the same time, several other people that worked in the call center started doing origami as well. The folders found more new and interesting things to fold, and there was a little bit of competition to see who could fold the most complex or biggest or smallest thing.

DofT and his coworkers shared books and links to various websites and soon, many of the call center's cubicles were covered in paper creations.

The Rose

DofT, outside of work, came across a copy of Origami for the Connoisseur. This was his first introduction to the work of Toshikazu Kawasaki and, of course, one of his rose designs. DofT folded through the instructions once and had the process memorized.

The design in the book is only for the blossom so DofT started tinkering with ways to attach a stem. The first few attempts were pretty basic and required some tape or other assistance to hold it all together.

Epiphany!

One afternoon, while out shopping and not really thinking much about paper, he was suddenly struck by inspiration. Out of nowhere, an idea bubbled into his consciousness that suggested he start with Kawasaki's spiral seashell but after the first few steps, veer off into a different folding sequence... He rushed home to try it out and it worked remarkably well... If he modified the rose blossom a bit.

DofT designed the stem not long after. He made several refinements to all three parts along the way to arrive at the design he folds today.

The Website

Originally, DofT's site was a user site hosted by his dialup Internet provider at the time. Among other things, he posted pictures of some of the origami he had folded.

When domain name registration was opened up and domain prices dropped he registered a domain and set up a new site with a new host that had some tracking tools. He noticed that many of the visitor to his site were looking for instructions for making roses. So that's what DofT did.

New Projects

Somewhere on the NOAA website, there is a file you can download and print out to make a paper globe. For years, DofT wanted to turn that into an origami project.

Finally, sometime in 2012, he set about making it happen. He used the graphics from the NOAA globe and carefully chopped the image up and figured out where to put each bit of globe on the paper so that when folded and assembled, it would become a 20-sided origami globe.

It was tedious work the first time around but once the first one was done, he found that he could write a script that would chop up a map and just replace the original grapgics with the new graphics.

Lots of trigonometry and coding later and he could generate a globe kit in seconds using any suitably projected map.

Not satisfied with only 20-sided icosahedron globes, he did some more trigonometry and coding and designed a module that, when assembled, would make a 12-sided dodecahedron.

And then, because he wanted something even easier, he created a template to wrap a map around a traditional waterbomb cube.

He started making globes of all the planets in the solar system, but when he got to Saturn, there was a problem... rings. So he designed modules that would make a ring that would fit snugly around the globe to give Saturn its rings.

Disaster!

Since about 2008, DofT has hosted all of his websites on servers he has at home. In August 2016, the server started acting weird so DofT ordered a shiny new one and he was going to migrate everything over once it arrived.

Unfortunately, after he ordered it but before it arrived, a hard drive crashed and took everything with it. all his sites, all his email... everything. And no backups.

The new server has been performing admirably since he got it up and running but life and shiny things have made the process of rebuilding his sites a painfully slow one.

We're back!

Well.. sorta... it's a work in progress but as he finds time, he'll get the site back to and beyond it's former glory.