A nice thing about this hobby is that you don’t need much to get started. Basically just a flat surface and some paper 🙂

I am a complete beginner and spent a good amount of time looking into what kind of paper is best for origami tessellations. Most of the “hall of fame” papers are VERY expensive. Not good for a beginner, since a lot of this poor paper is destined for the trash. SO! I bought a giant roll of kraft paper. No hard feelings if I wreck it, and so far it seems to perform reasonably well (for my level). It’s 70 gsm, it’s brown, it’s cheap, it does the job. I also have some 20x20cm squares of low end origami paper I got from amazon long ago, and those do the job too for smaller things.

A couple of other materials I bought very early on are a bone folder ( a cheap plastic one from amazon), a cutting mat which also serves as a flat surface (since my table has ridges on it), and a rotary cutter (perfectly labelled, in case you forget).

The bone folder seems pretty important, my fingers start to hurt pretty quickly otherwise when making grids.

The rotary cutter is nicer than scissors I think, but if you’re good with scissors, it’s not a necessity.

That’s it!