Peter Keller's flagstone weave tessellation. This one is really tightly packed. Definitely not for the impatient folder. It takes a lot of finessing and coaxing. I folded, unfolded and refolded so many  times before I was able to begin collapsing the design. Including folding the initial 32 pleeat grid, I probably spent 10 hours all together folding this design. It's hard to know exactly, since I was at work and kept getting interrupted. Suffice it to say, it was a lot of hours before I achieved success. They were enjoyable hours well spent though. It was an easy crease pattern to understand, but a challenging one to fold. I was pretty uncertain for a while that I would finish. I used some ordinary colored printer paper that wasn't very forgiving. It seemed like the papper was going to give out and just go limp and useless. Still, after so much folding, I kept at it. I had nothing to lose. To my surprise, eventually the paper began to cooperate and I was a...

This is similar to a design I was trying to conceive. Almost identical, except my hexagons were smaller. It's a typical flagstone that uses triangles on the backside to 'push' the front twists together. Flagstone tesses result in beautiful backlit pictures. They create optical illusions of three dimensions. The front and back also present very different patterns. https://www.flickr.com/photos/syngola/4967646805/in/album-72157624777290209/ What's interesting about flagstone tessellations is that they are pretty different from standard tesses. Even if you're familiar with the spread hex or other like designs, the flagstone genre is a unique variaation that will require you to learn new techniques in order to fold it. Typical tessellations are folded a few pleats at a time and flattened as you go. It's a progressive, linear process. For a flagstone the easiest way is to sure up all the creases and then unfold. Refolding/collapsing in clusters of single...

Lady's Flower tessellation. https://www.flickr.com/photos/praisepratajev/5526816483/in/album-72157627404378271/ Hexagons surrounded by closely grouped triangles. Looking at the crease pattern, I wasn't 100% sure how to fold the all of the triangle twists. Some seemed to be too close together. But once I got a good portion of the tess folded it became more obvious how some of the triangles rotated to fit into the design. A pretty easy fold compared to similar designs.

Here's a single module version of a crease pattern which can be tessellated infinitely. It's a flagstone tessellation designed by Robin Scholz who posted the crease pattern here .  Flagstone tesses are interesting in that you kinda need to precrease and then assemble all at once. Unlike more traditional tessellations where you simply fold a small portion and then continue folding small portions, flagstones don't lay flat in the intermediate stages. Each twist is dependent upon the other twists which emanate outwardly from it. Or at least, that has been my experience. They are a lesson in patience and persistance. On large grids with many twists it can get kinda crazy. Still, the results are worth it. Little girds like this one are great practice and still pretty interesting when complete.

 Here's a newly folded flagstone tessellation. It looks three dimensional when backlit, but it's actually a flat fold. Both photos are of the same tess - front and back. Pretty neat how different they appear. I found the crease pattern on Robin Scholz's flickr page. https://www.flickr.com/photos/praisepratajev/6055165461/in/album-72157627404378271/ It was a huge pain to fold, but in a good way. It's large hexagons surrounded by very closely packed rhombus twists. After having tried various methods for folding the complete pattern, I discovered the path of least resistance. At first I tried doing one molecule and then doing another whole molecule. That didn't work very well. Then I tried doing all the hexagons and attempting to fill in the rhombuses. That wasn't successful either. What did work was to prefold all creases. Then prefold all twists, except the very outer edges. Then assemble from the center outward using the genders created in the pape...

This is a variation on the Robin Scholz swarm tessellation. A central hex and then rhombuses and triangles. It's pretty when backlit. 

Triangle twists on the front arranged around large hexagons on the back. From the book: Six Simple Twists: The Pleat Pattern Approach to Origami Tessellation Design by Benjamin DiLeonardo-Parker I bought it looking for inspiration for creating new designs. But I liked this pattern so much that I went ahead and just folded it verbatim. It was a little bit tricky to collapse. The folds had to go in a lot of different directions simultaneously. I started out trying to first do a hexagon twist and then the triangle twists that radiate off of it. That didn't work out well. So I switched to collapsing a full ring to start. Meaning I arranged one hex and the six triangles around it all together until I was able to flatten that unit all at once. Then I radiated out from there in a circular fashion collapsing additional hexagon/triangle units one at a time. The edges were tough to get to lay right. Probably would've been better with a few of the outermost pleats removed or ...

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 rea...

I've been playing around with rhombus twists lately. It's weird. A hex twist is easy. A triangle twist... no problem. Square twists are child's play. Rhombus twists, however, really give me a lot of grief. Which was incentive enough for me to keep digging at them. I saw a photo on google of this tessellation made by someone else. I don't know who. I wanted to replicate it. Or use it as a jumping off ponit for something along the same vein. It came out pretty nice. Not a bad use of a few hours. There are probably more rhombus twists in my future. Cleaning up this design or refining it. The rhombuses didn't defeat me. but the war still rages.

Here's a rather crowded tessellation. Hexagons surrounded by triangles.  The backside make a tight weave pattern. The front is a chaos of triangles and hexes all banging into each other. I tried backlighting it, but it's so dense that no light shone through. It'd probably look prettier with the repetitions spaced more generously to allow some light to come through in the gaps. That may already have been done by someone somewhere. It rings a little familiar. Still the unlit version has its merits. It's kinda fun to play around with the overlays of triangles and hexes. You can get different patterns bases on which shapes are on top/bottom. My paper didn't really want to cooperate. I wanted all the triangles on top. But every time I put some of the triangles on top of the hexes, some of the other hexes popped up on top of the triangles.That might be a problem with my choice of paper. Or it could be the design simply isn't able to do what I envisioned. I wonde...

This tessellation was inspired by one of Lydia Diard's designs. Her website has some really amazing tessellations as well as tutorials for some. Just google her name. Hers is a little different from this one, but most of the idea credit goes to her. I just kinda took her design and did it a little bit backward. I really like how the back and the front give such different results when backlit. It's looks like two different tessellations, but it's actually just one. A small hexagon at the center of a 32x32 triangle grid. Then there are rabbit ear triangle sinks to create the star points off of the center. This is more easily visible from the second photo. This central design is simply repeated. It would fit nicer on a 48 fold grid, but my paper was not large enough for that. So the repetitions are only partials. Still.... the one side (first image) backlit comes out looking pretty well finished. Go figure. In the second image it's a little more evident that th...

I had some paper collapsing fun the other day at work. This John McKeever design was something I'd tried maybe a year ago with limited success. This time around I finally got it right. It really is an insanely difficult crease/collapse pattern. I found it so vexing to transfer to the page that I decided to just print the pattern and then cut out the square from there. Once I did that, it was actually quite enjoyable to collapse. In that frustratingly hard origami kind of enjoyable way. To facilitate the collapse I did all the folds in both directions. So even though the design calls for specific valley and mountain folds, all of mine were genderless. This helped in getting the paper to cooperate. I just used regular printer paper. Nothing special. I find a lot of regular priced origami paper weakens too quickly on tessellations and intricate collapses. The pulpy nature of printer paper helps give it strength for repeated folding. I collapsed the middle according to the...