Cattleya Orchid (Design by Michael LaFosse)

This is an intermediate model taken from Michael G LaFosse’s book – Advanced Origami: An Artist’s Guide to Performances in Paper, which incorates wet folding for the shaping of the petals and the use of tissue paper / crepe paper to enhance the look of the finished model.

This is my first try with this model, and as you will notice there is room for improvement. I used tissue paper (from American greetings), which you normally use for gift-wrapping. This is because of the fact that this model required fine paper or crepe paper to be used to give it the final shape.

This is one of the models in the book for which the final result really depends to a large extent on the manner in which you use your imagination to shape the flower. So with my imagination on a roll, this is what I came up with.

The size of the paper suggested by the author is that it should be twice as wide as it is long. So I started out with a sheet of tissue paper measuring 10” by 20” inches in size. This paper made it very easy to fold the model, but however, when it came to shaping the model, I found that it is too delicate.

The section, which I am not entirely happy with, is the petals (top left and right), which are somehow not shaped as nicely as I would like them to be. Wetting the petals didn’t make it any better as the paper started to crumple up a bit too much. So I had to leave it at that.

I think the next try would be with crepe paper, which is usually used for flower making, in any case!

But overall, this is an ingenious design and the steps in the book are relatively easy to follow. The overall size of the finished orchid is about 7″ inches or so.