Origami Calculators

Paper sizing, crease counts, thickness and modular unit counts. 8 calculators for folders. Card stock, envelopes and cutting sit under Paper Crafts.

Folds to thickness carries the best story on this part of the site. Every fold doubles the stack, so 42 folds of ordinary copy paper would reach 439,805 km, comfortably past the Moon at 384,400. Physically you stop around seven, because by then you are wrapping a 128-layer stack around a hinge that is itself 128 layers thick. In 2002 a California high school student named Britney Gallivan reached twelve, and the interesting part is that she derived the loss function first. Her formula is what this page uses: ordinary paper needs under a metre for seven folds and 879 metres for twelve, which is precisely why she chose toilet paper.

Paper size works backwards from the model you want. Simple models use 2.5 to 3 times the finished size, a crane or lily 3 to 4, and a complex insect 6 to 10, because every layer buried inside the model came from somewhere on the sheet.