Buying/Making Fake Dollar Bills For Folding

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Falcifer
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Buying/Making Fake Dollar Bills For Folding

Post by Falcifer »

I'm in England, but I suppose anyone who is not in the US would be in a similar situation.

Basically, I want some dollar bills.

The best I've found so far is Eagle Origami, who sells packs of 50 bills, with various origami-based designs on them.

What does everyone else outside the US do?
Has anyone used the ones from EagleOrigami?
I know that a few dollar bill models make use of certain parts of the design (the eyes of Won Park's koi, for example), so I would like something that would work for those models.

Some cheaper alternatives to getting some real dollar bills are welcome.

Just for reference, you can (theoretically) get 13 dollar bill-sized rectangles from one sheet of 40x50cm origamido, which costs about £9.
£9 is about $14 according to Google.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't consider dollar bills to be as good as origamido (for folding - for spending, I'm sure the dollar bills would be better, if you're in the right country ;-) )
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Post by anonymous person »

I know a few folders who use those ones from eagle origami. The guy who runs the Eagle Origami site ( a great site btw), Ash, regularly comes along to our London Origami meetings, and I know some of the people who go regularly use them too, such as Denver Lawson, a guy with plenty of amazing modulars to his name.
Alternatively, you could just google "dollar bill" copy and paste the images you get into a word dicument and hit print.
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Falcifer
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Post by Falcifer »

anonymous person wrote: you could just google "dollar bill" copy and paste the images you get into a word dicument and hit print.
I did this already and there were a few problems; 1) the colours don't print properly - I'm pretty sure that most banknotes use colours which can't be easily reproduced, 2) the ink made the paper wet and caused it to warp, 3) aligning the two sides is slightly hit and miss with my printer, 4) dollar bills aren't made from copy paper.

If I had a better printer, I'm sure it would work better but, as it is, this is not an option right now.

It's good to know that people use the Eagle Origami ones, though. I'm planning on getting the "One Folder" book anyway, so I'll see how the notes are. But it won't be for a couple of weeks (too many birthdays in the family this time of year!)
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Post by nonkelgans »

Just ordered 2 packs of 50 bills on the Eagle Origami site, for that price it's hard to make them yourself. Bills are protected by a special layer that makes scanning/copying them difficult (hence the colour shift). And with real bills the paper is a speciality, I don't know how close the ones of Eagle Origami are in terms of paper, I will have to see that when they arrive. You could always order a pack on the EO site, scan those and use that for practice, that's what I gonna do.
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LeafPiece
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Post by LeafPiece »

I know you need help from outside the US, but in the US you can buy play money from stores that sell novelty items and children's stuff. Usually, the size is wrong and the paper is terrible, but I have seen fairly realistic money with higher quality paper before. Maybe there is something similar in England?

That just made me think of something. What do police do with confiscated counterfeit bills? Are they destroyed? What a great source of folding material that would be!
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Falcifer
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Post by Falcifer »

nonkelgans wrote:Just ordered 2 packs of 50 bills on the Eagle Origami site, for that price it's hard to make them yourself. Bills are protected by a special layer that makes scanning/copying them difficult (hence the colour shift). And with real bills the paper is a speciality, I don't know how close the ones of Eagle Origami are in terms of paper, I will have to see that when they arrive. You could always order a pack on the EO site, scan those and use that for practice, that's what I gonna do.
I didn't know they had a protective layer. The colours look alright on my screen, so I assumed that it was more a printing/ink issue.
I'd be very interested to know how the bills are, so if you could post back after you've got them, I'd be grateful.
As for practice, I just use copy paper, cut to size. I'm not worried about practice, it's more about the fact that - aside from dollar bill folds looking better with dollar bills - many models utilise the design in some way, which is completely lost when done with other paper.

In the end, I will be getting some notes from EO anyway, because they come with the book, so I'll get some experience with them. But if people knew of another site which sold better bills for less money, then I'd obviously be more likely to use them.
LeafPiece wrote:I know you need help from outside the US, but in the US you can buy play money from stores that sell novelty items and children's stuff. Usually, the size is wrong and the paper is terrible, but I have seen fairly realistic money with higher quality paper before. Maybe there is something similar in England?
That is one idea that I didn't consider. Although, I'm not sure of the availability of dollar bill playmoney in the UK, or the quality. I could probably find something online, but again, there's an issue of quality. I'd have to buy some to see how good they were, and I was hoping for people to have recommendations for me. ;-)
LeafPiece wrote:That just made me think of something. What do police do with confiscated counterfeit bills? Are they destroyed? What a great source of folding material that would be!
I'm pretty sure that, yes, they are destroyed. That's if they're not clogging up some evidence room somewhere.
But I wonder how many counterfeiters make $1 bills. It might draw less suspicion, but you'd need 10-20x more, which would be riskier, and less cost effective. ;-)
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Post by anonymous person »

why don't you just buy loads of sets of Monopoly? XD
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Falcifer
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Post by Falcifer »

anonymous person wrote:why don't you just buy loads of sets of Monopoly? XD
If I could think of something cool to do with the tons of houses and hotels, I might. :P
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Post by madarko »

dude, i just went to the post office with a tenner and asked them to change it for some dollar bills, i got a bit of a funny look off the girl but i'm kinda used to that so i don't mind so much :D
have fun.
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Falcifer
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Post by Falcifer »

madarko wrote:dude, i just went to the post office with a tenner and asked them to change it for some dollar bills, i got a bit of a funny look off the girl but i'm kinda used to that so i don't mind so much :D
I know I could do that, but I would only get 16 $1 bills (according to the PO site today).
With the same tenner, I could buy 2 packs of 50 bills from Eagle Origami.

But if the design on the EO bills doesn't work, then it's not really worth it.

I suppose, in the end, I'll get some dollar bills for the final models, though, and use printer paper as practice. But if the EO bills work perfectly, then I'd rather have 50 bills than 16. ;-)
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Post by nonkelgans »

I hope EO is legit because at this moment my payment still stands as unclaimed, I have send an E-mail too but at this moment no response yet. Has anybody has closer contacts with the owner of the site??
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Post by nonkelgans »

I'm afraid that Eagle Origami is a dead website, I tried to order 2 packs of the origami money but after little more than a week my paypal payment still stands as unclaimed and mails that I have send remain unanswered. Too bad.
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Falcifer
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Post by Falcifer »

That is a shame. Thanks for letting us know, though.
I guess it's not a good sign that the most recent guestbook entry is from 2008.

I guess real dollar bills are the only option now.
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Post by nonkelgans »

OK, seems I jumped to conclusions too fast, EO has accepted my payment after all. So maybe there is still some hope of getting those bills. I will let you all know when I received them.
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Falcifer
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Post by Falcifer »

That is good news! Shame about the delay, though.

Thanks for the updates, too. They're much appreciated.
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