In the past couple weeks, I’ve been experimenting with papers. Methylcellulose is commonly used in complex origami to size paper, making soft papers stiffer and easier to wet-fold, or to back-coat two sheets of paper and adhere them together.
Since the Elephant Hide paper I usually use doesn’t need to be sized, I didn’t try out methylcellulose until very recently. Since my designs need fairly stiff, thick papers, even adding methylcellulose isn’t enough to make some papers usable. But, if the pretty paper is thin enough, I can use methylcellulose to adhere it to Elephant Hide, and the double-layer paper folds essentially like a sheet of Elephant Hide.
This model is folded from a fairly thin sheet of marbled paper adhered to Elephant Hide. The marbled paper has a bit of texture, so it didn’t stick to the Elephant Hide quite as well as I had hoped, but I was still able to fold it into a relatively simple vase form.
