This origami kit, Origami Animals, is pretty well-designed.  It’s kind of basic, but it has some neat features and would make a great gift.

Although there is a booklet included, this is mostly a paper pack.  When you open up the cover, the booklet is attached on the left, and the paper is on the right.

The way this is set up is brilliant.  All the origami paper I’ve ever bought before has come loose.  That’s okay, but it tends to slip around, get scrunched along the edges, etc.  And it has to be stored pretty carefully to keep it all together.  This paper, however, is attached at the top into a pad of origami sheets.  It all stays together and then you just peel out what you need.  It might sound a little silly, but I really love this feature!

The paper does seem to be just slightly off square (not crooked, but just a smidge more rectangular than square), but this didn’t cause me any real issues with folding.  It also isn’t a glossy paper.  It comes in a variety of fun prints, though.

This is nice for classic origami projects, obviously.  It’s also useful, though, for other folded projects, like corner bookmarks, or even as a stack of scrapbooking paper squares (assuming you don’t need acid-free; I’m not sure if this would meet that requirement).

The booklet of instructions is…not terrible, but not amazing.  The instructions are okay, but they do seem to presume some existing knowledge of origami.  A “valley fold” and a “mountain fold” are fairly intuitive concepts (and familiar to us from our creation of lapbooks with foldables such as those found in Dinah Zike’s Big Book of Books), but other terms, like “inside reverse fold,” are not so intuitive.  I was finally able to make this paper crane, although his head is not quite right (thanks to my ignorance of the reverse fold).

This probably wouldn’t be my first choice if I were looking for an introduction to origami, but it’s a fabulous paper pack with a book of 10 animals to fold as a bonus.  (Really, that’s how I’d view it — buy it for the paper, get the booklet as a bonus.)