Maarten van Gelder’s origami

This in from the comments:

Back in the late 80s, Maarten van Gelder had already come up with a set of origami gears:

Neat gears, but they only tell part of the story. Van Gelder’s work is amazing, and his commitment to help explain it is fantastic.

Maarten van Gelder is a retired programmer, who has amazing skills in origami. His website details lots of his original designs.

On his site, he explains some of his history with folding paper:

At an age of about 8 years I got my first folding book. It was a Dutch translation of ‘The art of Chinese paper folding for young and old‘ by Mrs. Maying Soong (1948). This book contains a series of models, but no explicit folding technique. So after that I didn’t do real Origami, but just a little bit folding among a lot of other things.

But summer 1980 there was some information about Origami in the newspaper and I got wondering. Than at Xmas 1980 I received a book along with some real Origami paper. The next three months I did nothing but folding. I took some of the folded objects with me to my office.

Someday one of our University users came in, saw the Origami objects and told me about the Origami association. So I became a member and kept folding. Not as much as that first three months, but steady.

For several years I’ve been member of the editorial staff of the magazine ‘Orison’ of the OSN (Origami Sociëteit Nederland). And after that I’ve been member of the Model Commitee of the OSN for 10 years. In the meantime I’ve also done some work of the OSN web pages.

His site has loads of photos and links to numerous diagrams. This looks like a great place to start if you’re just getting interested in origami, or if you already know it, but want to do more in fulfilling your paper-folding desires.

What do you like to fold? Have you seen stunning origami? Where do you find great resources and inspiration for learning more about origami? Tell us your thoughts in the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.