These photos are all from the British Origami Society Spring 2003 convention. Based in the unusually named Florence Boot hall in Nottingham, I managed to stay for the entire convention for a change. The special guests were Paul Jackson and his wife, Miri Golan (and I should mention Jonathan, aged 3 months as well). It was nice to see all the BOS regulars and to sink several pints with them. I also met several new friends from all over the world. As always, I managed to get a few photos of the various works of art. Missing (as usual) are several photos that I managed to mess up, including the amazing modular designs of Denver Lawson and Mark Leonard's Crossbow (including shoot-out).

Paul Jackson

Paul Jackson is a leading light in the internation origami movement. He seems to have written dozens of books on origami and was the driving force behind the 'On Paper' project. His latest origami designs owe less to the traditional geometric origami forms and more to organic forms. Not only is the shape important in these models, the texture of the paper was just as important too.

I've collected a series of photos of the various models displayed during the convention. Firstly, a series of models folded by Mark Leonard includes some Floderer inspired creations and several of his own designs. The crane fly and the spiders are designed from triangles of paper.

Next are a series of modular flower designs based on Herman van Goubergen water bomb units. These were folded and taugh at the conference by Wojciech and Krystyna Burczyk.

John McKeever taught his dragon design based on the Neale dragon design. He brought along a selection of models including a rather nifty rude orc.

David Brill was his usual jovial self, warmly welcoming everyone. His horse remains a classic and although he doesn't think his cat design quite works, I still think it is a splendid model.

Quentin Trollip is a designer from South Africa who is a self taught folder. He has created some rather novel designs and taught this bat design over a pint of lager. He has diagrammed a lot of his work and hopes to either put it on a website or get it published.

Loes Schakel has created this delightful scene using a selection of traditional simple models and shows that you don't need to fold supercomplex models to produce an attractive display.

Finally there are a couple of Tony O'Hare designs including his catamaran and his sheep - by the end of the conference there was a whole flock wandering about.

Other highlights included possibly the worst opera I've ever seen written by Paul Jackson and the novelty folding competition. This convention, the challenge was for a group of five to fold as many models beginning with a single letter in ten minutes. I was in David Brill's group and although everyone was declared a winner for taking part, I'm sure we romped home with 49 different models. I came up with about 20 of them, including a blue square, a blowpipe, a brachial artery and bronchitis. If I get enough demand, I may diagram these although they won't be too difficult to describe...