A Siamese Cat
A challenege on the Origami Mailing list was issued to develop a Siamese cat recently. I decided to give it a go! Rather than design my own base, I decided to try and modify a John Montroll model. The 'Sitting cat' in 'Bringing Origami to Life' is a nice model, but in my opinion has a major flaw. An important rule of Origami that David Brill suggests is efficiency of paper; that is corners should not be tucked in and forgotten. In the cat model, three of the four corners are not really used! I have decided to utilise them for this Siamese cat. Firstly, the flap in step 4 of the sitting cat is folded back on itself to create the black face in the Siamese, and is introduced after step 22. Secondly, the mountain fold in step 7 becomes a diagonal valley fold; this gives enough paper for the front leg to beome black. A closed sink in the center of the model about step 25 facilitates this. The tail is simply a pair of raw edges wrapped around, and an unsink in step 31 allows black ears.Asides from all these, the dimentions used are a little different to give the thinner body and pointier ears. In the end, the model looks quite satisfactory!
Models in Origami books can often be modified like this. If you see a flap that is brought to the centre and not used, always think to yourself, 'Could I use this to make a colour change version of this model?'
