A guy I knew in high school knew how to fold a dollar bill into many different shapes — I remember a ring, a duck, and a strange sort of unconvincing sailboat. He drove the cafeteria ladies up the wall, paying for his meals with these bills all tightly folded up in different shapes, but the rest of us teenagers were quite entertained by it.
I’d forgotten all about it until I tripped over Clay Randall‘s Money Origami page, where he gives clear instructions for making a variety of objects from paper money.
And I started thinking, wouldn’t a Christmas tree be nice for the holiday season, perhaps as a little gift to slip into a kid’s Christmas card or stocking? (There’s an illustrated tutorial for how to make a cute little gift box, too.)
But this Money Origami caper is more expensive for us Canadians, now that we no longer have one-dollar bills — or two-dollar bills either, for that matter. It’s all coins, Loonies and Twoonies, now. So we’d have to do our folding with fives or better.
Let’s see, it takes four bills to make an origami Christmas tree… but $5 Cdn bills are blue and $10 bills are purple. The lowest denomination that’s anything approaching a nice pine green would be a twenty… 20 times 4 equals, well, more than a stocking stuffer! Maybe I’ll fold a tree out of fives and call it a blue spruce.
