Traditional Origami: Pepper and Salt set

In the first class of the primary school, I learned this from mrs. Schroo, the school teacher that learned me and many others to read. Every birthday, when a child was distributing sweets, one sweet had to be given to the monkey. At the end of the year, the birthday of the monkey was celebrated, and the sweets of the monkey were distributed among the children in the class. Curiously, every child received about three or four sweets. To keep the sweets in, this pepper and salt set was folded by the children. Each of the four corners can contain one sweet.

The model is still popular nowadays, in many countries. A nice game is to write something behind each of the flaps inside the model. Then, someone has to choose a number. Another person has in each of the four corners a finger, and then makes the chosen number of movements with the kind of mouth we have. Two of the flaps are visible, and the first person chooses one of the visible flaps. This one is lifted, and the text behind the flap is revealed: often a possible characteristic of the person that had chosen the flap, e.g. `nice', `ugly', etc. Then, giggle.

The model is easy to fold.

Take a square piece of paper.

Fold it diagonally in half, in both directions.

And fold it in half in the two other directions. Like this,

And this.

Fold a corner to the middle, like shown.

And fold the other three corners also to the middle.

Like this.

Now turn the model over.

Again, we fold the corners to the middle. Note that we are doing it at the other side as before.

Here, all four corners have been folded.

And now, the final, somewhat harder step. We have to move the four points just folded to the middle towards each other, and open up the flaps.

And this is what we should get!

You can use this to store things in.

A view from the side.

If you put your fingers in the four pockets, you can make the model move. Choose a number: one, ...,

..., two, ...

Have fun!