Ah memories. I used to steal school supplies to make origami fortune tellers and sell them to kids in grade school.

Then I realized becoming an unfeeling capitalist only concerned with profiting off of my fortune tellers was making me into a monster, and I haven’t looked back since. Now if I do origami, it is either for personal use or as gifts. The darkness tested me, I saw what that path would make of me, and I chose the light.

I may not be an origami mogul, but my humanity wasn’t worth discarding to become one.

The version of this I always think of is the one in which you’re playing a video game and get stuck. And unlike today, where you might spend an hour before you give up and lookup a walkthrough, in the 90’s when you got stuck, you just… stayed stuck. Like, “well, I guess I’m going to spend the next week or two on the Water Temple running into every wall and bombing everything until hopefully something opens.” Oh and it turns out the solution is something you tried within the first 15 minutes but didn’t get quite right.

Made a killing selling origami ninja stars in elementary school for a buck each.

I don’t do origami much anymore, but I really liked it as a kid. In any case, I think the books are honestly nicer to use. You can look away without having to pause each time to make a fold, and you don’t have to wait for the person in the video to finish each step. Just have to get the hang of interpreting the different types of dashed lines and what they mean to do. It does help when the book is well written and includes a small amount of text under each step to help interpret ambiguous instructions though.

Don’t forget trying to go through a knot tying book with only images and descriptions to guide you.

Yo what? Does no one here remember the origami tv show? It might have been PBS and only 10\15 minutes long but it was real. It started out with them always fanning it a stack of origami paper by rubbing their fist on it and then squaring it out again. I don’t think they spoke. Early 90s, let me go find a link.

I’m a 2000’s kid so I had the internet and found a lot of pictograms with Japanese explanations and if I were lucky, there were English ones with isn’t my native language either

I remember checking out an origami book in 3rd grade and liking it so much that I just continually renewed it all year and memorized a bunch of designs. Skip ahead to 7th grade and I was in a math class with a terrible teacher and I wasn’t doing well and constantly getting Cs and Ds. So to make myself feel better, whenever I would get homework or tests back from that class with low grades, I would turn it into something beautiful 🥲. The following year, I had to retake that class. The only time I’ve ever had to do so. Except, this time I was doing phinominally to the point that my teacher questioned why I was even in her class in the first place. Almost like it was the previous teacher that was the problem… Anyway, I still remember that first book I checked out all those years ago and still remember some of the designs. It gave me a pretty good outlet for my sadness when I needed it.

I definitely much prefer the esoteric lines and diagrams I can’t stand watching a video to fold, it sucks rewinding and pausing to try and keep up. Hey is there anybody else out there fucking around with pirated PDFs, Tanteidan conventions, and Double Tissue?

And you got damn good at it eventually!

I wow people with tiny flowers and cranes, I could do it in my sleep lol

Worst books were the ones that missed a step or forgot to draw a line. Something simple like flipping the paper over.

I think I got one or two books like that as a kid and have never touched origami since.

I was particularly blessed when I first started, because my first origami book was from the 1950s and had each of the models in it glued to the first page of the instructions. 4-year-old me never would have figured out the bird base if it weren’t for that book.

god sure didn’t like care(?) about origami

Lol the origami section was the very first place I would check when I visited the library as a kid. I would always get so bummed if they were all checked out

I had an actual Japanese man teach me at the local art museum.