blah blah intro

Ingredience

You will need:

  • color printouts of the jrmf hexa-hexaflexagon
  • glue sticks
    • (I mean it)
    • (If you use tape, your thing will be so thick that it won't flex nicely.)

Instructions for assembly

Stage 1: Make the long, double-thick strip

  1. (If you are going to do any mapping stuff later, consider writing numbers on each of the colors. I find that the blue and the purple are often a bit hard to tell apart, for instance.)
  2. Cut out the two parts of the strip.
    • On one end of each part, there's white triangles with a black border around them. You want to keep those attached; they are glue tabs for later.
    • On the other end of the strip, there's notches where there aren't borders. Cut those ones out.
    • Thus your two pieces will look like if Pac-Man was a very colorful dachshund1.

I have cut the two parts out of the sheet of paper, showing the attached glue tabs and the removed notches

  1. Fold both of the parts in half, hot-dog style, with the color sides out.
  2. Glue the insides together.
    • Now your two parts are both double-thick.

The two strips are shown folded in half, and I've applied glue to the inside of one

  1. On one part, you have a blue triangle sticking out; on the other part, you have a yellow triangle sticking out. Glue the back of the blue triangle to the back of the yellow triangle.
    • Now you have created one long strip, which is double-thick all the way along!
    • On one side of this long strip, all the warm colors are happening. On the other side, all the cool colors are happening.

Showing the two sticking-out triangles that will be glued together, and demonstrating the long strip that results

Stage 2: Fold up the hexaflexagon

  1. Starting with the warm colors, fold same-colored triangles diagonally onto each other: yellow onto yellow, orange onto orange, and red onto red.

    • Here's a picture of folding red onto red. Notice the blue dashed line I drew where I am making a valley fold. A creased strip with a blue dashed line down the border between two red triangles

    • Your strip will kinda coil up as you do this. Here's a partially folded strip. A partially folded strip that has begun to coil

  2. Once all the warm color diamonds are folded up, now all the cool color triangles will be lined up in diamonds. Fold blue onto blue three times.
    • In the picture below I am pointing out the first two blue-onto-blue folds; once these two folds are made, only green and purple will be visible. Flip the strip over to find the third blue diamond.

All the warm colors have been folded, leaving only cool colors visible

  1. Now your gadget will be a hexagon with one green side and one purple side. Hooray!

A hexagon with one green side and one purple side

  1. The white triangles with black borders are glue tabs. Tuck the one triangle behind the other so that the glue tabs line up, and then glue them together.

Showing how the glue tabs look after they have been tucked but before they have been glued

  1. A word I have needed to look up how it is spelled every time I have ever attempted to write it. ↩