Fortune Teller
The Fortune Teller, also known as the Cootie Catcher or Salt Cellar, is one of traditional European origami designs. In different languages, it is known unde...
Action origami
Action origami is a class of models which have movable parts. These include all sorts of mechanisms with elements that slide relative to each other, multi-piece puzzles, and models which rely on paper’s spring action for movement.
This page lists models of a single type. You might be interested in folding instructions instead.
100 Złoty Frog
Polish banknotes have 2:1 proportions, a square folded in half. This makes them good for adapting models folded from square paper. I came up with the idea of...
Flasher
At one point I thought I’d design an origami flasher. Unsurprisingly, since I went for the simplest possible idea, I ended up with a design which had been in...
Hypar Flasher
This origami flasher snaps into a hyperbolic paraboloid when unfurled. The center is based on a set of twists similar to those used in the Pythagorean Tiling...
Dodecagonal Kaleidocycle
This origami kaleidocycle is an example of a flexible polyhedron, and an action origami model. You can see the cycling action in this video by Ed Holmes, in ...
Traditional Jumping Frog
Jumping frog, one of my favorite traditional models, and an example of action origami.
Tic-Tac-Toe Board Foldable into a Bowl
This model, which includes tessellation elements, has a 3×3 field of squares which reminds me of a tic-tac-toe game board. The pattern is based on Square Pix...
Fragile Heart Tessellation
This is a tessellation which represents a heart. The heart can be shaped to become a broken heart, which allows the model to be treated as action origami. Th...
Broken Heart Box
A box with a heart, which is also an action origami model. When things go wrong, the heart can be reshaped into a broken heart. The heart itself can be tesse...
Adjustable Cube
This cube is a mechanical toy. Its size can be adjusted: the cube can grow or shrink by a factor of about two. It starts out as a cube with a pattern resembl...
Steinhaus Puzzle
This puzzle, described in Hugo Steinhaus’ book Kalejdoskop matematyczny (Mathematical Snapshots, literally Mathematical Kaleidoscope) consists of six pieces,...