Turning Gears Origami Tessellation : Origami Tessellations

Turning Gears Origami Tessellation

I really haven't landed upon any new origami tessellations of mine own as of late. Instead, I've been having a good time finding those of others and figuring out how to fold them. It's a wonderful way to spend a few hours.

This one was simple enough to figure out, but pretty difficult to execute. It's comprised of mostly fussy folds. A lot of off grid work and tight vertices.

It also requires a bigger grid. Even just one repetition needs at least 19 pleats on the half.

Whenever I'm trying to fold a design that won't fit on a 32 pleat grid I always go for a 48 pleat grid. It's the next easiest to fold from a hexagon. You can get thirds pretty easily and then just keep doubling. I haven't yet found a tessellation that I couldn't fit into one of these two sizes of grid. Mine don't always have as many repetitions, but I don't mind that. The end results still turn out great.

Still, I wound up folding it pretty small. Even the largest hex taken from a standard piece of printer paper yields pretty small pleats when folded into a 48 pleat grid. Nevertheless, the result came out awesome.

I'm pretty sure my overall patience with everything and everyone has increased tenfold since I started doing complex origami tessellations. You just have to be willing to put in the extended effort and wait for the slow finessing to eventually yield results.

First image is my fold. Second is the picture of the original I used to recreate it. Last is my sketch I used to map out the pattern.

I accidentally spaced my repetitions further apart.

The original design appears to use spacer shapes that are one pleat smaller.

From the first two photos they almost look like different designs, but they're not. It's just how the light comes through different kinds of paper.

This unlit image of my fold shows their sameness.

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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