The World of Popagami - Origami Animal Fun review

How much fun can you have with a piece of paper? Well, the answer is, quite a lot, if you're talking about Popagami ! 

Inside the pack, you get oodles of printed sheets (24 to be precise), ready to be folded and "popped" (by blowing them up) into cute origami animal heads. If you're a total novice when it comes to paper-folding, the instruction book shows you everything you need to know.

There are lots of different designs available but they all use the same technique so once you've got it mastered, you'll be able to create them in seconds.

You have the choice between cute cartoon-style animals, more realistic illustrations or even a photo-design.

There is also a black and white option which you can phototcopy and colour in to make your own totally unique model. This would be a great activity for a kids party.

The instruction book shows you all the different Popagami characters and gives their names, which is a nice touch - there's Gilly the Giraffe, Jack the Rabbit, Rivets the Robot, Buckaroo the Horse, ...

Inside the book there are also smaller Popagami designs that you can cut out and fold into finger puppet sized creation (finger popettes ?!).

Madhouse Nanny is a bit of an origami expert (compared to the rest of us anyway !) so we made sure we got the Popagami out to play with when the Madhouse grandparents visited. She had a quick look at the intructions and said "oh, it's just the basic water bomb design" - um, OK, if you say so !

Sure enough, she was off, folding the sheet this way and that then blowing into it so that it popped out into a 3D figure.

The meerkat one is really effective. (We just needed to snip his ears off.)

But the illustrated designs look great too.

It's a lovely wet-weather activity and is also a great for long train/plane/car journeys or for taking on holiday because it takes up very little space and doesn't need anything, except for nimble fingers !

If you like the idea and want to give it a go, you can try out some of the free downloads on the Popagami website - I love the stars and stripes Betsy design that they released for Independence day.

star rating : 4/5

RRP : £7.99 for the combo pack containing the book with 24 Popagami sheets, but you can buy just the book, just the Popette pack or even individual designs

for more information : www.popagami.com

Disclosure : We received the product in order to write an honest review.