Folding a round paper plate into square box

Most origami starts with a square sheet of paper. The corners of the square are integral to shapes and folding lines. Would it be possible to fold a ROUND sheet of paper into a SQUARE box? And not just any ordinary round sheet of paper, but a PAPER PLATE.

Maybe your blueberries are rolling off your plate as you carry them up the stairs. Perhaps it would easier to carry your blueberries in a box.

The answer is yes. It is very possible to fold a round paper plate into a square box. Your nine-inch paper plate will transform into a two-inch box.

I folded this plate into a box, because I had no phone to occupy my time.
And I am xeroxing the box, because I have no phone to photograph the box.

I was standing in the Chicago Tribune lunchroom, waiting for my tv dinner to heat up in the microwave. The past few days I’ve been without a phone, so I didn’t have anything to read. And oddly, there are no print newspapers in the Chicago Tribune lunchroom. Weird, right? So standing there, I saw some paper plates and wondered if a round shape could be folded into an origami box. And it worked!

The thickness of the paper plate made it a bit tricky, but the texture of the box is really nice. I never realized how textured paper plates are. Funny how it takes the object completely transforming itself for me to notice a quality that was inherent all along.

Here are the instructions on how to fold a paper box.

Other projects I’ve done from origami boxes

Folding artwork by Felix Gonzalez-Torres into a box at the Art Institute of Chicago
Recycle Hersheys Kisses wrappers
Origami box from sticky note to hold Hershey kisses foils for recycling
Origami McGyver in action
If you don’t have a paper plate, you can make a blueberry box from a regular sheet of office paper.
When my wife and I asked people to be in our wedding party, we made a custom origami box of each person, with a gummi ring inside. Then each person’s box served as the photo on their bio on our wedding party webpage.

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