The Origami Forum

Hi All,

I'm new to origami and I'm making various arts and crafts wire mesh objects(cat, dog, etc) and I want to use small sized paper to cover these objects.
The mesh holes will all be a curved or straight, squares and rectangles of different sizes.
The paper will be all be the same small size but with different colours and patterns.

I'm having problems working out what paper folds to use to fix the paper in between the wire mesh.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

She might be able to help. Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I believe she wets paper, then fixes it over a metal frame. As the paper dries, it stretches tight.

Thanks for the reply.

I should have also said that I want to achieve wire mesh object something similar to ( http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NpINLHeo8rM/S ... s400/5.jpg ). And I want to fold the small pieces of paper into the holes of the mesh so only paper is showing and there are no gaps around the whole mesh and there is no mesh wire showing.
So for example, the original idea I had was to simply fold the individual pieces of paper into a concertina, then fold the concertina into two halves ( http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cJ5nsTZsOZI/T ... C_0362.JPG ). Then feed the folded concertina through the mesh hole and pull through until the half fold touches the wire. Then staple to fix.
So the mesh would be fairly small and the paper would be very tight together.

But I was wondering if there are any other folds I could use to make it look more even, rather than have lots of squashed fat dots of paper?

I think what you are looking for is Papier-mâché. There you tear small strips of paper and apply them to your metal mesh sculpture with wallpaper glue. You can make several layers of paper beginning for example with newspapers (cheap) then for example a layer of kitchen tissue or toilet paper (to make it really smooth looking) and in the end tissue paper (colour).

Thanks for the reply.

Papier mache is one option, but I wanted to do it by preserving and showing some of the paper patterns and colours. So I wanted to use some form of folds.

Any more ideas from anyone?

Well, if you want to preserve the pattern of the paper, I think Polly's wet-shrinking technique might be your best bet. If not that (because the paper is too small or whatever), then Anna's suggestion of papier mâché might be best. The reason you are not getting any pure-folding answers is because folding paper neatly and tightly over a wire mesh can not be done with some generalized folding unit. You could maybe use some modular unit and use the mesh as a guide, but it would probably not conform to the mesh very well. Folding paper into/over complex 3D shapes is very difficult. Folding paper into accurate curved panels (I assume the wire is curved, not formed into flat polygons) is simply not feasible.It is not that we don't want to help, but your request is for something that is very difficult and awkward to realize with folding alone.

Thank you for the reply.

I'm very grateful with all the help I'm getting and I know what I'm asking is probably a long shot.

I was also thinking maybe even folding each piece of paper like scales over each hole in the wire mesh, but what folds could I use for this or would this be unfeasible?

Maybe just cut the paper to size and glue it to the mesh? As I said, if the holes in the mesh are not uniform in shape (which I assume they aren't), there probably is not a generalized fold that would work. And by probably I mean almost certainly.