I had been thinking about designing custom origami paper, where the patterned paper would reveal itself into a design once properly folded, and then Victorian puzzle purses happened to come up on my feed. Victorian puzzle purses were origami-like paper pieces that were folded up to hide its contents. They were often used for love letters and were usually decorated by hand to have different designs reveal themselves when folded/unfolded. Since Victorian puzzle purses have several stages of unfolding, it was an opportunity for multiple designs in one piece.

Design and Planning

I had drawn several typographic designs in Photoshop when I was practicing hand-lettering and decided to reuse one for this project. This design was based around strawberries (Turkish: çilek), so I already had some visual iconography to work with. I first finalized designs for the three “main” folded forms - the initial folded up form (giant strawberry iconography), the back of the completely unfolded form (English word “strawberry” out of vines) and the front of the unfolded form (initial çilek design.)

I then worked off of each of these designs to plan each unfold accordingly, covering the rest of the design with strawberries and vines and linking them across each unfold so it would look smooth across as many forms as possible.

Folded

Unfolded twice (completely unfolded)

These didn’t need to be adjusted since they were simply dependent on the other unfolds working.

Unfolded once

Folded

Unfolded once