Dodecavirus

The Dodecavirus is made up of 13 dodecahedra -- a yellow one in the middle, and 12 blue/red ones around it. Orange connectors attach the outer ones to the middle one face-to-face. Each dodecahedron is made of 30 Post-it notes folded in one of 3 different ways. There are 330 Post-it notes in total.

Each Post-it note is folded in a way that hides its sticky part, and there are no other building materials; although I did use some rubber bands temporarily during construction to keep the yellow middle from falling apart. In the final result, everything is attached using folds only, and the model is surprisingly rigid despite its size.

I got the core of the idea for this design from this video by Matt Parker, but it's almost certainly an older idea than that, appearing in prior Youtube videos.

The Dodecoration is made of 30 identically shaped pieces of paper, and it is convex. I was interested in making bigger, non-convex shapes by "gluing" dodecahedra together, which ended up requiring two more kinds of pieces -- the yellow and orange ones in my design. I was hoping to glue enough dodecahedra together to make a cycle, but that turns out to be much trickier than it seems. See Distortion below for more on that!

For now, note the gaps between the outer dodecahedra. They are only touching at the inner edges. In fact, there is no way to glue three dodecahedra together without distortion so that each pair is glued face-to-face.

Here are some more shots of the Dodecavirus.