The Great Origami Book & Kit

Rating:
Summary: Best unusual projects of any origami book
Review: ...my daughter (8 years old) and I have many, many origami books and this is one of the best. The animals, flowers, stars etc which are featured in this title are excellent and we have found them in no other book. Like any text onh origami, you have to read from the beginning and understand the way the author writes, in order to be successful.

Rating:
Summary: Best unusual projects of any origami book
Review: ...my daughter (8 years old) and I have many, many origami books and this is one of the best. The animals, flowers, stars etc which are featured in this title are excellent and we have found them in no other book. Like any text onh origami, you have to read from the beginning and understand the way the author writes, in order to be successful.

Rating:
Summary: Better to find a book you can flip through first
Review: I have recently been trying to add new books to my craft book collection, and since I enjoy doing origami and I've recently been getting into handmade books, I thought I'd expand my library of origami books to provide myself with ideas for page elements and cover decorations. I have been designing a large "first book" for the two year old son of one of my coworkers. Tammi and I have known one another for over a decade now, having met while we both worked on the ICU ward in our hospital. We now work on the recovery ward together. She and her husband were blessed with a child during their thirties, and no one could be a more enthusiastic Mom than she. An interactive book that she could read with her son seemed just the thing, and origami forms to illustrate it seemed a splendid and simple way to go about the project.

Although I have several books in my library that include origami plants and animals they are a little on the old side (some dating to the 1960s), so I decided I'd see what new had been published. I selected three origami kits out of curiosity: Origami Made Easy by Irmagard Kneissler, Origami Jungle by Michael G. LaFosse, and The Great Origami Book and Kit, by Zülal Aytüre-Scheele.

First let it be said that I'm all for creating innovative and attractive ways for involving more people in the fun and creativity of origami. I've done paper folding and paper crafts for almost 30 years now, and I'm still learning about the art. Kits make sense in that they provide the beginner with everything they require at a known price. One doesn't purchase a reasonable book and discover there are a dozen other things one requires that all cost a fortune. It allows the novice to pick up a kit, try a few projects and decide whether this is a hobby they would enjoy enough to go out and find new materials to try and new more sophisticated books to study.

This said I also have to point out the caveat to this form of "boxed learning." In each situation, the packaging is designed to attract the purchaser. It tells what is included and stresses that it's all you need to do the projects, some of which are displayed on the package itself. What it doesn't do-short of opening it or having an open copy available- is let the purchaser look through the book itself to see if the illustrations appear too confusing to follow, or if the projects are useful and interesting enough to bother with. Furthermore, the choice of papers included is at the whim of the designer, rather than at the discretion of the novice artist. While none of these kits is particularly expensive, I felt that the drawbacks were not negligible. Two of the three kits were deceptively large but consisted mostly of packaging designed to attract attention.

Of the three books, I found the Aytüre-Scheele the most useful for my specific project. It contained the most interesting flowers and the most recognizable animals. It also contained patterns for buildings. While a little less diverse, the Kneissler book had patterns for a cat and an owl that were quite charming, and designs for masks that were stunning (I could see doing these in large pieces of handmade paper or expensive craft paper to hang on a living room wall). The LaFosse jungle animals were a little disappointing, because they often required quite of bit of interpretation to see the animal in the folded product. Of all of them I was most impressed with the Butterfly in Book One and the Tortoise and the Arrow Frog in Book Two.

On the whole, I think I'd suggest finding a book on origami and paging through it to see if the designs appeal. You might pay even more for a good book of designs than for the kit, but you'd know that the patterns were ones you would really like to try. You will also get an idea of how easy or difficult the designer's method of illustrating the folds is to understand. You can start out folding plain old xerox paper then purchase more colorful-and expensive-papers at a local craft shop when you gain more experience.



Rating:
Summary: Missing Diagrams
Review: I opened this product and read the whole book before i started useing it. I found that when i went to use the diagrams that the author failed to make a complete step from 1 to 2 2to 3 and so on. It would be an improvement if the author said to fold here or there with diagrams showing how to actualy do this. The pictures are more helpful than the writeing itself. You can get stuck on the very first project. I would not recommend this for beginners.

Rating:
Summary: Missing Diagrams
Review: I opened this product and read the whole book before i started useing it. I found that when i went to use the diagrams that the author failed to make a complete step from 1 to 2 2to 3 and so on. It would be an improvement if the author said to fold here or there with diagrams showing how to actualy do this. The pictures are more helpful than the writeing itself. You can get stuck on the very first project. I would not recommend this for beginners.