If your interested, here’s some stuff about spiders.

• Nephila, a large orb weaver spider, lives in the tropics and makes webs so strong the local people use them as fishing nets.
• The Japanese jumping spider can jump 40 times its own body length.
• The black widow is a very tiny, very poisonous spider. Within an hour of being bitten you would be in agony, the poison would spread to your chest and you would stop breathing. Thankfully there is now an antivenine so less the one percent of people bitten actually die. In actual fact, in the twentieth century, fifteen times more people were killed by jellyfish than spiders. Perhaps I’ll fold a jellyfish next…

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Sugar gliders are actually one of my favourite animals, so I enjoyed reading about them.

• Sugar gliders can glide as far as 50 metres and can steer while they’re flying by curving there patagiums (whatever they are ).
• Sugar gliders love sugar, so they eat sap and stuff. Acually, a suger glider came down our chimney and started eating the sweets we keep on the mantelpiece. We found the poor thing cornered by our cat. Fortunately, it wasn’t hurt. After having it checked over at the vet, we were able to release it outside our house &emdash; I even got to see it do a bit of gliding!

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My first attempt at a praying mantis. What do you think?

Some interesting things about praying mantises:

• Praying mantises camouflage themselves as twigs. When prey, such as a small insect comes near, they snap the segment at the end of their forelegs shut with remarkable speed to trap their victim.
• Larger species of praying mantises also prey on small lizards, frogs, birds, snakes, and even rodents. Mantises are often aggressive towards one another, and even eat each other given half a chance. :-O
• Praying mantises are masters of camouflage. Some species in Africa and Australia are even able to turn black after molting if there’s been a fire to blend in with the blackened environment. A black origami mantis would look pretty cool

You can read more about these amazing creatures on Wikipedia.

Diagram for this model will be coming soon.

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This is the first model I designed using box pleating. It is very simple and made out of a rectangle. Good for a beginner who is learning about crease patterns.

Crease pattern coming soon.

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