Artists have long used kirigami (from the Japanese kiri meaning cut and kami meaning paper), a less heralded cousin of origami, to create everything from pop-up cards to castles. A few years ago, L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) started thinking about what we can learn from how artists control the location, orientation and number of cuts to create these complex shapes.