Big Blue Box Bottom with no will to live

When we last left our big blue box, it had slumped over like a murder victim on a park bench.  It was crushed and so was I.

But hope springs eternal in the human breast (thank you Alexander Pope) and the minute I stopped thinking about how to solve my problem, the answer came to me.  I built an infrastructure for the box, using foam-core and mat boards, and then folded the beautiful ocean-blue paper around the cardboard playpen.  No tape required – I had already cheated enough.

Reinforcing the base

Yay!  Box standing up!  My invaluable friend Rachel helped me move it into my studio after I cleaned and swept and pushed everything to the side, leaving enough free room only for the box and two admirers to enter the space at a time.

Yay! Box standing up!

Then we made the lid – which is exactly the same process as making the bottom, except the folds are made slightly further from the center point so that the ensuing box (which turns over to become lid) has dimensions just a little bigger than the base.  We were so much better at doing this the second time that I really feel we should hire ourselves out as a gigantic origami team.  Surely demand is peaking right now!

Rachel after the big move into the studio

Carefully carrying our lid to my studio, we placed it over our now sturdy base and then stood back to watch what disaster would befall us next.  Hold our breath… don’t move… and nothing happened.  That was the best nothing I had seen in a long time.  The lid sat firmly on the reinforced side panels of our big blue box.  Perfect.  Long periods of appreciating our handiwork ensued.

Big Blue Box complete!

So you’re thinking: okay, great job, amazing artists.  But don’t forget that this is just the first box of a stack that is intended to reach the ceiling.  Total of 8 or 10 or 12 – just high enough not to hit the duct work that we ARE ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to touch.  The next box is supposed to be about 4 feet across.  That means a piece of paper 12 feet square for the base and another for the lid.  The piecing and creasing continue.

A 2-inch box. No construction issues here! Could this be our pinnacle?

And will we need to reinforce our next creation?  Or will that extra weight crush the fragile base box?  Will the blue lid we just installed sag under the weight?  If we were engineers we would know that in advance.  After all, engineers don’t build bridges and then wait to see if cars will fall through them.  But we are not engineers, we are dreamers.

Stay tuned!