Giant American Millipede (2006-2025)
Not yet folded
Crease pattern: Above!
Diagrams: Please no

Giant American Millipede: Any takers?

Consider this an open call to any origamists: Do you like folding 192nds grids? Do you have 4-foot-plus squares of paper lying around that are red-orange on one side and black or rusty-red on the other? Do you have at least a week of free time? If so, you could be the first to fold my Giant American Millipede 2.0 design! I will happily provide coaching, advice, and moral support. However, I have to recognize my own limitations. I folded a Young Millipede, and that’s probably as much millipede as I will ever fold. (You’ll have to trust me that the crease pattern successfully collapses. I took the biggest piece of paper I have and folded a quarter of the big design. My fingers nearly fell off!)

But I get ahead of myself. Back in 2006, I was inspired by Robert Lang’s Pill Bug and Centipede along with Brian Chan’s Scutigera to fold a millipede. It was a foolhardy errand, but believe it or not I actually did it! Thanks to Michael LaFosse’s boundless mentoring and encouragement, it even took part in the Origami Now! exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts (2007-2008), which was easily the pinnacle of my childhood origami experience.

And yet, I was never fully satisfied with the design. The legs tend to splay out to the side, as if it was a (gasp!) centipede. (Of course, millipede legs face downwards.) And the crease pattern is at best ‘squidgy’. Over the next nearly 20 years, I told myself I would fix up the design. Here and there, I would take a large piece of paper, start folding the grid, but never get particularly far.

Over the years I also kept my eyes out for millipedes in the real world. They’re surprisingly easy to find! Not just at insectariums, but skittering around Cham temples in Vietnam and even crossing the sidewalk in my own neighborhood in Vancouver. They called to me and gave me new ideas for how an origami one should look.

Finally in 2023, I set out to redesign the millipede from scratch. Some aspects are the same, but a lot are different. In the new design, there are more rivers, allowing the pairs of legs to stick out further. The basic leg pattern is derived from a Pythagorean triangle, which repeats ad nauseam. The legs are folded from the middle, rather than the edges, so they are more able to stick downwards rather than splay out to the sides. The color-changed shell is folded by the two edges wrapping around in a circle and locking into one another. Not to mention improved antennae and even potentially eyes.

But don’t take my word for it! Check out the actual folded version from **Insert name of future origamist here**.