Victorian Puzzle Note Folding

Making a Victorian puzzle purse, or note, or letter.... it was all about the folding

Sep 01, 2024

If you are new here, a bit of context. I share thoughts on creative habit and the keeping of an illustrated journal as a balancing and mindful act, a mapping of the passage of time. I love fountain pens, birds, and connecting the dots in the world around me. Into that mix is the reality that my partner died three months ago, so many of my posts make reference to the layering of grief and loss onto the ongoing search for meaning. This remains a search for light.

A Victorian puzzle note, folded and partially unfolded. — A Victorian puzzle purse (or puzzle note), folded and partially unfolded. A. Cowen 2024

“The folding or doubling is itself a Memory: the ‘absolute memory’ or the memory of the outside, beyond the brief memory inscribed in strata and archives, beyond the relics remaining in the diagrams.” ― Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

When was the last time you folded a note?

I’ve folded lots of paper airplanes and paper footballs and fortune tellers. I’ve folded zines and even a crane or two. Long ago, I folded paper gift boxes.

This week is about a folded puzzle note and about folding itself, folding as a verb and a metaphor. This week is about folded spaces and the memory of paper, the memory created when we repeat familiar lines and patterns that give shape to our lives.

I came full circle with the puzzle note and ended up enchanted by the process and the whimsical allure of the space. It took a bit to get there though.

Thank you for reading.

Amy

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Make Something

The month of June sits oddly in my head now. Looking back, there is the sense of things being muffled, suspended, and in slow-motion. I’m not sure it felt that way then, but now when I try and peer back into that fog, there is the sense of looking at something shrouded and cocooned.

One night, I grabbed two sheets of basic printer paper and handed one to my mom. “We’re going to make something,” I said.

One of the things I had initially planned to do in June was try folding a Victorian puzzle purse. Back in May, I had been thinking about how to best fill my weekly posts during my Mom’s visit. The puzzle purse seemed like a good “crafty” thing we could try and that I could then share. (We didn’t know, in May, that the visit would turn into a wake.)

“We’re going to make something,” I said, handing her the sheet of paper.

I didn’t need to write about it at that point, but the idea, a little “to do” on the mental list, was still there, a bit of a splinter in my head, something too sweet, too precious—something I needed to clear.

“We’re going to make something.”

I passed out the paper, and then I tried to find a decent video. I was unprepared in the moment to do this folding, but I thought that we needed to fold these little notes. I thought it might matter.

In the way we so often think that something we do will be transformational or exceptional, I thought that folding a pocket note was going to unlock something.

We then proceeded to try to make these folded things that have been everywhere in my Instagram feed over the last year. They are typically referred to as Victorian puzzle purses. I think of them as Victorian puzzle notes.1

There is something delightfully practical in the idea of the puzzle purse. Fortune tellers are fun to fold but limited in usefulness. The puzzle note, on the other hand, is both a container and a letter all in one. It is a letter that folds into its own envelope. It is self-contained. It is resilient. It can stand alone.

All it takes is a single sheet of paper.

If you’ve watched videos of people showing ones they have made, decorated like whimsical tea party notes or something that might have fallen out of a book of poesy in a secret garden, you know they are enchanting.

When other people make them, they are enchanting.

Collapse It How?

When my mom and I tried to make these, there was a good bit of laughing. We both had trouble with the folding. Even when two people think they are doing exactly the same thing as they fold and press edges, invariably someone has something backwards or has interpreted something differently along the way.

I had trouble getting my folded thing to collapse the way it was supposed to. Finally, it flared the right way, and we both had little folded notes with a tucked-in flap. Mom squashed hers down to flatten anything slightly unruly.

We had two pocket notes we were slightly afraid to unfold for fear we wouldn’t be able to get them back together.

“Now what?” she asked.

It was beyond underwhelming.

Had I folded a paper football, I would have been excited because it would have brought back something from my childhood. A simple triangular paper football would have been charming in its simplicity because it is rooted in memory.

The Victorian pocket note was a disappointment. I was glad to have folded it, but without being beautifully drawn or painted, it’s just a square of folded paper.

“Now what?”

Neither one of us was all that enthused about “decorating” the note, and we didn’t.

In June, the pocket note was a bit of a popped balloon. I know that in cleaning up after my mom left, I threw away the one I ran across. It was, after all, just a folded square.

The pocket note came to mind again this week. It came out of the blue. It came drifting back into sight from the cocoon of June.

It’s about the folding, I thought.

For me, it’s about the folding. It’s about the process itself, this folding and tucking and the magic that happens along the way when, suddenly, there is a little tab that can be tucked in to close the note.

I tried again.

When the Doing is What Matters

The idea of folding rose this week as important. The sense of folding space and time. The way words fold in, one upon another. The way memory folds and collapses. The way something folded is full of creases when opened and laid flat. The way it wants to fold again, the edges curling into the lines it knows, the lines that have been established, the sequence of folds that will return it to its nice and tidy square.

Maybe that’s it…the lines it knows. The folding is the process of creating a shape that is safe, a shape that is comfortable, a shape that is known, a shape that has set parameters.

I am going to guess that many people don’t spend time folding. They spend time moving outward, stretching, expanding, and reaching. They spend time unfolding. We are taught to embrace the unfurling.

But I’ve spent a lifetime folding, creasing lines with my finger, exploring nooks and crannies within the folded space, hatching the shadows at the corners, wandering, at times, in the margins and empty spaces, listening to echoes, and mapping the way edges meet and cross.

I am an adventurer only of the folded space, only of the familiar and the known, only within the walls of safety. Those contours, the things that made me feel safe even in the face of the looming unknown, have been erased. The folded note has been torn, a pinwheel arm dangling, unable to be tucked, unable to secure the space.

When it comes to the literal puzzle note, it bothers me that I have so little interest in decorating the folded paper. It makes me tired just to think about it. I don’t have “make it pretty” in my bones. I really don’t.

Folded, Not Pretty

I tried folding a puzzle note again this week. My first attempt didn’t go so well. I was immediately stumped by the need to fold the square paper into thirds, which is tough to accurately eyeball. (Ruler, schmuler.)

Once I started folding, I didn’t flip the paper over when I should have. I overlooked this and didn’t think it would matter, but it does. I may have even folded everything in both directions, which isn’t helpful for this project. I confused the paper, and, ultimately, I had trouble again with the step where the note collapses. Once I got it collapsed, my pinwheel arms were backwards to the ones shown in the directions I had open. But it worked.

I tried again later, thinking I could solve the “backwards” section. That time, I realized my earlier mistake. Flipping the paper for the angle folds makes a big difference. When it came time to collapse the note, it collapsed easily. With the folds properly in place, the paper had memory. It knew where to fold. Oddly, my points were still reversed from the directions I used. Still, I got it tucked.

I had a little white square with a lot of space folded inside.

It didn’t look like much.

I felt bad for being unwilling to waste time decorating it. How could I write about this folding without having a pretty note to show? (It seems obvious that sharing this is about sharing this beautiful thing you might appreciate for its tiny and intricate art. But, really, this post is in praise of folding.)

Not sure if I could send this letter with a photo of a white square, I took some colored pencils and made a few marks on the outer square. With just a bit of rainbow splash, it looked more like something you would want to open, something that might be passed under desks at school.

I unfolded the first layer and contemplated the pinwheel arms and the center space. I filled the center with wedges of color. I grabbed a fountain pen and wrote in a Mary Oliver quote.

For some reason, the ink kept burping. Maybe it was the paper. Maybe the pen has been sitting a while since I haven’t been drawing with my typical black. When I unfolded the note to reveal the inside, the fountain pen had bled through.

I was even less interested then in filling in the spaces.

I just couldn’t do it.

I was curious though about where the illustrations fall when folded, how they line up, how they are oriented on the flat sheet compared to where they appear in the folded note.

I thought I would make a diagram showing how the space is used. If you were going to decorate the note unfolded, you would need to understand the map of the folded space.

Puzzle note partially unfolded and opening — A Victorian puzzle purse being opened. It really is a cool concept. A. Cowen 2024

So I made another one, and something happened.
I got a bit hooked.
I used a thicker paper, paper I could paint.
I still didn’t get a ruler out. (Okay, I didn’t find one.) But I did get out something magical.

I got out a bone folder.

It is probably a sign of how far inside the folded space I am right now that the experience of using the bone folder was the most soothing and magical thing that has happened in weeks.

I’m not sure when I last used a bone folder, if ever. I always assume fingers work just fine. The bone folder was so satisfying.

I watched the folding process. I paid attention to the folds that make the pinwheel arms. I saw how it works, how the folds create memory, how the paper wants to collapse into its folded shape.

It’s a really simple fold.

I’ve got it now. I’ve got the steps. I’ve got the memory of the folding, which gives memory to the paper, which creates a folded space for a special note or illustration.

I still don't have it in me to decorate the inside. I don’t have a letter to write. But I am really glad I tried it again. I was even sort of compelled by the bit of surface paint I added. It was sort of fun.

I made another printer paper one to sort out the location of the panels. Here’s how they go.

Diagram of the folded spaces of a Victorian puzzle purse. A. Cowen 2024

Things marked with a 1 form the folded square top, the part you are looking at when you hold the note. (Only half of each triangle shows when the note is folded and tucked.) 2 indicates it shows up on Layer 2 when you are unfolding. Layer 2 has a center square and four pinwheel arms. Things marked 3 (along with the “Center note”) are only visible when the paper is unfolded. The direction of the writing shows the orientation of the panel when it’s folded (important if you are adding art that will connect or needs to face a certain direction). The inner 3 corners can be treated as squares or as two triangles. Designs can flow to the adjacent triangles as well.

(I realized right before posting that I had not accurately represented the half-triangles. I think it’s properly depicted now.)

When you make your first one, fold it completely and do your designs directly on the folded note. This is the easiest way to understand what you see on layers 1 and 2. Then, when you unfold it, you can just fill in all the remaining space however you want. That will be the “inside” of the note.

The diagrams show how the folded spaces appear and what the “faces” are, the planes you see at certain points of the folding and unfolding. This is what is important to me, the fact that this space transforms, opens, shuffles and reassembles so that new stories appear.

If I write to you, I will fold it into a puzzle purse if you want. But don’t expect it to be decorated.

Actually, I think I’ll fill the spaces with words and let you connect the dots.

Here’s a (short video) look at the memory of the paper. It wants to fold back into this shape. It’s lovely in that way.

🎯 The Sunday post is free to all readers. For those keeping an illustrated journal or building sketchnoting skills, I’ve shared a simple set of icon practice prompts for September.

“Nothing is set in stone. A bird can be refolded into a boat, a fish, a kimono, or any other extravagant vision. At other times it aches to return to its original folds. The paper begins to fray. It tires, rebels.”― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

Weekly Bits and Pieces

Made It?

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your comments. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

If you are interested in seeing some beautiful examples of Victorian puzzle purses or folding your own, see The Artistry and Intrigue of Puzzle Purses. (Pretty much every video I watched did the wrong-side folds differently or in a different direction. Just pick any video that does those folds only half way (not all the way) and give it a try. Once you see how it works, it won’t matter which direction you make the folds, just be consistent.)

What’s your favorite folded thing to make?
What would you put in a folded puzzle note?

I am grateful for readers like you.