For the past couple of months, the CourseHorse ‘Summer Sparks’ series has held free classes at Hudson River Park every Tuesday, but for some awful reason I’ve not known about them until now. Today I finally clocked on and headed to Pier 63 for their latest offering – an origami class.

I had envisioned making swans and owls, but our instructor Soma (from the Brooklyn Brainery) assured us that making geometric shapes were much cooler. So we got to work making six Sonobe modules, which we used as building blocks for our structures.

This stage was pretty simple. I picked it up quickly and found it so therapeutic. But then came the trickier, fiddlier part – fixing them together to make a 3D object. We opened our modules so they looked like parallelograms and created a cube by pushing the triangular edges beneath flaps created by our folding.

I was so proud!

Then we moved on to a octahedron. Until this point, I’d whizzed through the stages, proudly finishing the modules and cube in pretty good time. But when I couldn’t get my head around this next structure, I very nearly had a bazzy. Thankfully Ryan had enough patience for the both of us.

Apart from my near-meltdown, this was such a relaxing activity with a cracking view across the Hudson to Jersey. And we picked up a new party trick! (Next time I’d like to make those swans though.)

And if you’re interested, the Summer Sparks series concludes next week with a free banjo class.