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Vortexes Origami Tessellation 2.0


 I have been looking back at some of the tessellations that I did several years ago. Back when the whole idea of creating my own tessellations was still a crazy, new concept. 

It's certainly interesting to see how differently I thought then in terms of shapes, construction and overall concept. 

In some respects, it feels like I was more creative back then. On the other hand, I feel more skilled today. More able to bring random ideas to fruition. 

This tessellation is another design of my own which I had to reverse engineer because I didn't properly document it the first time.

It tripped me up for a bit because I was trying to simply recreate the shapes using standard construction methods, but there's actually a secret to finishing this one.


Its basis is a pretty simple design that is augmented by a series of reverse folds on the corners of the spirals.

When you examine it from the back you can see better what shapes are involved. 

There are the open back hexes. Then the plus one pleat hexagons butt up against them to form the angular wings flanking the hexes. They repeat in triads. At the center of those triads are blunt cornered large triangles. 

When you complete that and flip it over you still need to reverse fold every other corner on the wings of the spirals. 

I wasted some time trying to recreate the front before I switched to solving the back and finally realized how I had done it. 


This time around I made sure to save the crease pattern. The second picture below indicates which corners to reverse fold. 




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