Hungarian Map Fold

This origami fold is similar to the Turkish map fold, or a continuation of the fold I show here. I first saw this fold in Niko Silvester’s book “Waterlily”. Below are 3 of the finished folds glued together. Under that are instructions for the fold.

Connected Hungarian Map Fold

Start with a square piece of paper
Fold it in half
Open the sheet, rotate it and fold it in half again
Open the sheet, rotate it and fold along the diagonal
Open the sheet, rotate one more time and fold along the last diagonal
Open the sheet & place it so one of the the diagonal folds is pointed at the top.
Push the green areas of the sheet together along the horizontal fold (you are reversing this fold).
Make the folds crisp with your bone folder.
It should now look like this…
In the top layer, fold point A to the center line, then point B
Press down on the folds with your bone folder to make them crisp. It should look like this now…
Flip the whole thing over and fold the edges in on the other side. Press the folds on this side with your bone folder. It should now look like this…
Open the sheet completely, carefully unfolding all the folds. The sheet should look like this.
This is the only tricky step. Pinch the fold at the red dot with your left hand. Reverse the fold along the red line by using your right hand to push it toward your left hand (this will also reverse the folds that go diagonally from the red dot). Repeat with the folds marked in blue.
Once you have the folds reversed, the paper will fold up like this when it is flat.
Here’s what it looks like opened up
And this is from the side
connect-them To connect several together, just glue up one wide of one finished fold and place another on top of it.
Nested hungarian map folds The folds also nest together very nicely. I made this with 4 square sheets of increasing size (2″, 3″, 4″ and 5″).

9 thoughts on “Hungarian Map Fold”

  1. Thanks so much for the detailed instructions. I’ve done the turkish map fold but never put several together to make the fabulous waterlily–just lovely

  2. Dear Susan – greetings from SF. I just found your instructions. What a great variation of the map fold. I love it! Thank you, I will definitely use this again. Bettina

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