Society Focus: Introducing the Trinity Hall Origami Society
Origami Society Presidents
Sumei and Jake
Hello! My name is Sumei and I am a third-year Natural Sciences student studying Chemistry. I am co-president of origami soc with Jake, who I founded the society with in our first year. As a society, we meet up and fold origami together based on online instructions. We are a rather small society of around 15 people with five to six showing up regularly to our fortnightly origami sessions. We usually fold animal patterns but have also done some origami tessellations and modular structures during these sessions.
The Society
The eventual aim is to learn how to design our own models, but the folding sessions are really there for anyone who wants to do some paper crafts while listening to music and chatting. After the end of exams, it has become somewhat of a tradition for us to organize an origami picnic where we hold a paper plane competition – which has been won by the same person (an Engineer) two years in a row.
We used to live on Q-staircase where we held our first sessions squeezed around the table, where half the people couldn’t see the instructions on the screen. Thinking back, my favorite session was probably the very first, where we folded a seagull design by Riccardo Foschi. This set us up to keep folding paper animals and we have since made rabbits, kangaroos, aardvarks, hippos, dinosaurs, sloths and many more. Out of all these, my favorite design is the Kangaroo by Jo Nakashima, which is one of very few patterns I have memorized.
I first started folding origami after visiting Nara, Japan with my family in 2019, where an elderly lady at the tourist’s office showed me how to make an origami deer. Although this particular pattern requires cheating (i.e. cutting and glueing of the paper), I quickly became obsessed with making tiny paper figurines.
Get involved
If you would like to get involved, just email one of us presidents (our email addresses are listed on the JCR website) to join our WhatsApp group chat where we organize our origami sessions and meet-ups.
The Origami Society will be hosting a session as part of the Sharing Hobbies and Interests Projects on Thursday 15 February in addition to their fortnightly meetups. To take part and register your interest, please email the Wellbeing Team.
