Tiny origami hat how to#
Tiny origami hat Patch#

The paper tape would fold and blend into the large sheet much better than a plastic tape, so it was the simplest choice. I used a narrow band of paper masking tape to create the seam. The roll is 47 cm wide, so two pieces of 47cm X 94cm, joined along their length would make a square close enough to the 1 metre size I needed. IKEA sells them as rolls of 40 metres of paper, so even though this particular roll has been in use for years, length was not an issue. An IKEA roll of children’s drawing paper I had around felt solid enough to work with.

Tiny origami hat Patch#

Rolls of paper are good because they have near infinite length in one direction, and so you only have to patch them together in one direction. If this were meant to be a finished piece for display, I’d have sourced a single large sheet, but since this was only for use in a photo and not meant to stand up to close physical scrutiny, I decided to use what I had around the house and make my own larger sheet. I was fairly sure I didn’t have such a large sheet lying around. From the proportions of the small hat to the small paper, I figured out that to fit my head I’d need a square that was almost a metre long on each side. To make up for the difference in size between my fingers and my head, I’d need a much larger piece of paper to start with. The original samurai hat I’d made for my Instagram photos, like the one above, was made of a small square of note paper, and the result was wearable by my finger. This model, the lower one in the picture above, I though would do nicely, so now I had to make a really large one I could wear. I looked around a bit and came back to a model I’d made for my Instagram account, a taller origami samurai hat model from a slim origami book published by Daiso. When worn, it becomes an almost conical rounded shape and doesn’t have the standing, literally and metaphorically, which I needed to make the picture look serious. Not so much because of the shape, but because it is a very simple model which lacks much structure. The most basic origami samurai hat, the top one in the picture above, was a little too basic. The idea of the raw-looking profile picture brought to mind something warrior-like, and so samurai hats were the place to look. If this was one of those colourful, parent or child-aimed sites, a simple conical dunce hat might have been a good enough visual joke, or something more playful. If clothes make the man, then surely this hat would make my about page, so the choice of hat was important.

Tiny origami hat how to#

At the time I was setting up the site, the hair I had in abundance, so the question was, how to make the large origami paper hat. Long-haired guy screaming into nothingness, wearing a paper hat, is not exactly your standard hobby-site fare. This needed to be a little different, and so I wanted my profile picture on my about page to be different, striking rather than inoffensive, and so I came up with the idea of the picture you now see on the about page. This could not be another flowery crafting site with people smiling at the camera in their profile pictures, posing in to their pristine living rooms or gardens. In keeping with that general direction, I wanted to make a clear visual statement of intent. Yes, fun can be serious, and that’s where I wanted Papernautic to fit in. Lots of colour, decoration and mood, very little seriousness and fun. Being on the internet for the last 15 years now, I’ve seen paper craft go from niche geek interest, serviced by hand-coded, rudimentary HTML pages, all strictly functional, to hobbyist paradise with flowery blogs, soft focus photos and oodles of Pinterest photo-porn by people who either see it as a solemn craft or a childish pastime. The idea behind Papernautic has most to do with scratching a personal itch of mine.