The Origami Forum

We've all had those moments when we screw up something in a model, so what's your worst?

Nice topic! I'd have to say the stupidest thing I've ever done is spend hours precreasing a model, then realising only at the very end that i precreased the wrong sized grid. Such a waste!

folding late at night, and creasing from the wrong reference. one time, when folding a diagonal gridded cp, i creased the grid horizontally. and it was a large grid, too.

Ricky -> Thanks, and I've done that as well once or twice.
I've also precreased a model before realizing I sketched out the CP into a rectangle instead of a square, and once I spent two hours folding something from really good foil only to split it open during shaping. And I've folded from the wrong reference point a few times. 48x48 grids, too.

There was a point at which anything I set out to design somehow became a bird at the end of the folding sequence. This rut took up almost a whole summer to get rid of. It was like somehow I'd be aiming for legs and toes and flaps for a face and to my horror the dragon or mammal I was trying to fold became wings and a beak. There is a box full of them somewhere that I'm eager to forget about. I mean one or two bird models are fine, but I'm not an aviary.

I made tissue foil for the first time and went straight away and tried to fold Nguyen's Eagle O_O
Biggest mistake ever, I ruined the foil and wasted my effort and material

I creased a 64x64 grid on an 18" square of recycled paper and 30 seconds into the collapse, it ripped in half.

Finishing a time-consuming model, only to realize misalignments of edges and false flaps caused by wrong precreasing from wrong reference points.

folding robert lang's bull moose. i got a long way in only to realize i cut the paper wrong.

Folding all the scales for Lang's koi over the course of a week, only to realize when I finished that they were all backwards, pointing towards the head instead of the tail.

I spent 3 hours precreasing large grid (about 70x70, and don't remember which model) and collapsing model, and then it ripped too...

Folding on the wrong references when there are a few confusing crease marks. This is especially irritating while doing sinks because then the paper would pop up on the wrong crease.

Also, I tried Cuong's Eagle. First time, the paper wasn't square, and I messed up on folding the 5ths . The next time, with a nice, large square of tracing paper, I again messed up creasing the fifths ( ^ ) I went ahead and it didn't realize my mistake till quite late. Its lying unfinished.

I was folding something (I forgot which one, but it's pretty complex) and there was a tiny rip on the thick part. I could have pasted another piece of paper over it, but instead I got mad and torn the paper apart. Soon, I realized that that was the only paper I had left . I feel like Helen Keller, no offence.

I cut the same, expensive paper to the wrong proportions about 6 times in a row, and wasted several metres of the stuff. I was very, very angry by the time I finished.

Good topic! The worst I have done happened when I was foldig my cyclommatus metallifer design. I precreased the entire model, grid of 52, only for some of the precreasing to not line up. I spent ages trying to figure out what went wrong when I relised that the cp I drew was not square, it was a grid of 54 by 52! Well I quickly changed the cp and everything worked out well in the end