Recently I was going through some of my old origami project books for inspiration to see if there was anything I could redo better now or to attempt something I had not tried before.

One of the very first books I bought for myself was Paper Fold It by Steve & Megumi Biddle as it has very simple projects. There were a couple of projects regarding decorating something for gift-giving purposes, and a few focused on ‘tato’. A tato is a flat purse or pouch and can store small items for storage or for a memory, so I thought it would be nice to practice making some.

In the following projects I explored, I used a 15cm square of double-sided patterned/coloured origami paper. The crane pictured in the images is folded from a 7.5cm square of patterned origami paper and measures about 4cm both ways.

The first tato featured in this book (pictured on the front of the book) was referred to as a flat-pack tato and it needs to be tied up. It opens up into a box that feels quite sturdy but the item inside must lie flat and be very small. I used a silver length of cord to tie it up but a gold colour would have matched better.

The second tato was referred to as a treasures tato and can fold in on itself to close up the gift. Here are some free instructions on Origami Instructions if you would like to try this yourself, but you must be confident with squash folds to finish it.

I liked this one more because it did not need a cord to tie up the gift and can hold something a little bigger, however it did feel a bit more fragile compared to the previous one, so it might need a card insert.

After folding these tato, I looked elsewhere to explore other gift holders. Did you know you can simply make a box out of just paper? As usual, Origami Instructions has a tutorial for this. When folding the lid, the lines towards the centre must be offset by a tiny bit to create the space needed to fit the lid over thebox.

This one does require two pieces of paper and might seem fragile, but the inside can be padded to make a sturdier box. This box would be able to store things that are a little taller compared to the previous tato. You could certainly store small objects like paper clips in this if you needed to tidy up the desk!

Finally I found this video by Kimigami for making an origami gift bag. This was quite interesting to follow because the neat folds create a simple triangular bag. This does require tape to close the gift bag and it does come out quite small but it is very sturdy and can hold taller items. Maybe some string could be attached to make a loop to hold on?

It seems there are a lot of ways to gift a small object to someone using paper as the medium. One thing I have learnt here is that a 15cm square of origami paper might be a little too small for general use – I think 20cm would be a good starting size if you want to gift something that isn’t just a small crane!

They also aren’t too difficult to make and guests at an event could take away a small token from it, such as confetti or candy.

Materials used:
– 15cm square of double-sided patterned/coloured origami paper
– silver cord for the flat-pack tato

Tools used:
– scissors
– tape for the gift bag