Star Twist Tessellation : Origami Tessellations

Star Twist Tessellation

The star twist and its extended version have been thoroughly documented in print and on the Internet. It's an easy design to fold that yields pretty impressive results.

There are a whole lot of rabbit ear sink folds, which do make it a little tedious. But as far as concepts go, it's fairly simple to understand.

It's a straightforward crease pattern to follow. The trickiest part is all those rabbit ears so close together. It won't flatten much until you've done a lot of them. So the paper can be a bit unwieldy for a good portion of the collapsing. But once you begin to get those creases into place they tend to remember themselves.

I like to do the hex twists first. Flattening each and then unfolding. Then do most of the rabbit ears and really get those all in place. Unfold again. Now assemble starting with the central star and working outward using all those preformed creases to let the paper naturally fall into place.

I actually really like how the rear of the design turns out when completed. It's often quite helpful when doing rabbit ear sink folds to go to the back of the paper to make sure the creases are landing where they should and to clean up their alignment a bit.

In a lot of tessellation patterns I've found it quite enlightening to go to the back of the paper. When I'm not 100% understanding how to complete a fold switching to the reverse side has often been what fully illuminated the mechanics of it for me.

So if you're ever stuck on how to work a design, I would recommend checking out the rear.

Comments

Infinite Triangles Origami Tessellation

This is just a flash idea I had. There was no planning involved. No inspiration. I just started folding and followed the lure of the creases in the paper. Upon seeing the finished result, It kind of reminds me of Robin Scholz's Triphilia tessellation, but the construction is definitely different and I was not thinking of that as I was crafting it. The similarity is that you can arrange the layering of the triangles into different patterns of your choice. I went looking and discovered I had folded this a few years ago and called it Triangle Temptations . I didn't realize this until after I'd completed this model. Apparently, according to my original post, I'd seen someone else fold it on flickr and recreated it. This happens sometimes. You hit on an idea and it's something you've done and forgotten. They linger in the back of your brain and come forward unexpectedly. That previous version differed from this one slightly, in that it used double sized cross g

Micro Rhombus Stars Origami Tessellation

This tessellation is micro rhombus star twists. I'm pretty sure I've seen this done with larger size rhombuses, but not with ones this size. They are the smallest natural rhombuses of the triangle grid. The center is achieved by collapsing a small hexagon. On the other side there are small hex twists and open back triangle twists. Since the shapes are rather small, it's a little bit difficult to fold. It's probably more of a cool weather tessellation. Humidity does the paper no favors on such small designs. But the ideas come when they do. Reverse view and crease pattern images follow.

What If Caviar Could Talk Variant

This origami tessellation is a variant of one by Arseniy K. He named his 'What If Caviar Could Talk'. After I had solved his design, I decided that I wasn't up to reproducing it exactly as he had folded his. Perhaps another time, in the future. So I changed things up a little to make it slightly less difficult. Both designs have a foundation of open back hex twists with triangle twists around them, He used micro rhombuses between the repeats. In my case, I used larger natural rhombuses instead. Still a difficult fold to execute, but much less so. It still required thick paper. I used tant folded into a 32 pleat triangle grid. You can see from the photo of the reverse side how densely packed everything is. It's a few layers deep. So be prepared to wrestle with that. My crease pattern for this iteration is included at the end. To fold his, sub out small natural rhombuses in place of my larger ones.

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