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Origami Chopstick Rest (PICTURES)
Origami Chopstick Rest: UPDATE 1 (DIAGRAM)
Origami Chopstick Rest: UPDATE 2 (VIDEO)

Have you ever touched the table surfaces at your local Chinese restaurant? There’s a reason why they invented the chopstick rest.

You don’t have to buy one can carry it around with you. Next time you’re waiting the 10-20 minutes for your food, take your paper chopstick wrapper and make an origami chopstick rest.

Here’s a sample:

Many chopstick wrappers are open on one end. However, some wrappers may cover the chopsticks completely.

It may be necessary to rip open one of the ends. You can tear it off completely. I choose to leave it on (no bits of paper to throw away).

Fold the wrapper in half.

Fold it again in half.

This next step is optional. I re-fold so that there’s no hanging torn bits on the outside.

Fold in half along the length.

Fold triangularly along one of the corners.

Do the same for all 4 corners.

Fold them together and you get.

At this point you can stop. You’ve just created a simple chopstick rest that’s fairly functional. The first time you try this you may find the food arriving on your table when you finish. As you become more adept and folding them, you may want to modify this base to create fancier and in some cases more functional chopstick rest. I’ll give an example below.

You may notice that the above chopstick rest may rock back and forth. The middle support section is a little longer than the sides. One way to fix this is to fold the middle support section.

Do it again for the other side and you have a more stable chopstick rest.

One last thing about this rest is that it is straight along its length and the chopstick may slide off the sides. To avoid this, we can create a saddle, a slight curvature down the middle like the real chopstick rests.

Here’s the final rest in action:

I’ll probably update it later with instructions in traditional origami notation.

UPDATE: Using a CC-Attribution chopstick rest image.
UPDATE2: Added links to the other updates.