Read this on someone else’s thread and then became consumed with curiosity:
How do you make a rose out of paper?
Seems like a cool thing to be able to do.
'Tis rather difficult to answer in prose, so I’ll offer up a link:
http://dev.origami.com/diagram.cfm
Type in ‘rose’ as the search term, and you’ll get a variety of 'em.
Careful: you can get sucked into origami very easily.
My favorite origami author is John Montroll. You can find a lot of his simpler works on sale at Amazon for dirt cheap, or if you happen to find yourself in DC, you can check out the Sackler Gallery Shop. A lot of my attempts at Montroll’s designs used to be on display in the shops there, but I think they’ve all been taken down now.
According to one of my former co-workers, Montroll is a physicist who conceives his incredibly complex designs in his head while doing yardwork, among other things.
There is something infatuating about paper folding. At one point at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman sparked a paper-folding craze that had people going nuts. (According to James M. Gleick)
The best origami Rose I’ve ever seen was designed by Toshikazu Kawasaki, you can find it about a quarter of the way down this page. If you don’t have any origami experience, this one’s gonna be kinda hard to make.