Free Sample
The Purple Guide to Learning Origami in 10 Days
A 10-day starter plan that gets you folding real, recognizable models and shows you if origami is worth your time
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Day
Welcome to day one. I want you to do something right now, before you read another word: find a piece of paper that you can fold. It can be a page from a notebook, a piece of printer paper, even a receipt or a paper napkin — anything flat and roughly square-ish if you can manage it. The exact size and quality don't matter today. What matters is that you have something in your hands, because origami is not a sport you learn by reading about it. It's a physical skill, like tossing a ball or tying a knot, and your fingers are going to learn more from today's twenty minutes than your eyes will learn from an hour of reading.
If the paper you found is rectangular — like a standard sheet of printer paper — don't worry about it. For today, a rectangle is fine. You'll fold it exactly as it is. The perfect square paper thing is a concern for later in the week, and I'll tell you exactly how to deal with it when we get there. What I want on day one is to get you folding and to give you a feel for the two fundamental movements that every single origami model in existence is built from. There are no exceptions to this. A crane, a flapping bird, a samurai hat, a box, a dragon that takes forty steps to fold — all of them are just variations of the