Chasing the Folds : Origami Tessellations

Chasing the Folds

This is another tessellation by Arseniy K that I fussed over until I had it figured out at last. Once I'd discovered the crease pattern, I realized it was going to be pretty tricky. It's small and compact. Still, I pressed onward, in spite of my doubt.

It took a while to fold. The paper I was using was not thrilled about what I was trying to do to it.

Eventually, it acquiesced to my stubbornness and I had success.

I found it very helpful to work mostly on the reverse side.

I was never confident I would actually complete the fold, but I had nothing else to do other than try. I continued on despite my ambivalence and it did come to fruition.

That's the thing about tricky folds... they simultaneously inspire and intimidate me.

It's an interesting experience to see the paper go from a floppy mess of grid and pre-creases to over time finally surrendering to these mad configurations.

It's almost an addiction. Or maybe it literally is.

I do have a crease pattern, but I haven't photographed it yet. Will add it at another time.

But it's pretty obvious from the back side photo that it's tiny stars from offset set hex twists repeating.

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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