Joel, Oschene, and Joseph Wu Originally uploaded by EricGjerde. A wonderful experience. still trying to process everything, will do some nicer writeups (and image uploading/fixing on Flickr) once I’m back from NYC at the end of the week. Here’s Joel Cooper, Joseph Wu, and Philip Chapman-Bell (aka Oschene). I just realized that between the 4 of us, they all have better beard/mustache combos than I do. Next year I’m going to have to double my efforts if I want to compete!

Well, I packed up most of my tessellations into a giant binder, and I’m waiting right now to board the flight to NYC. I’m looking forward to sharing some of my work “with the public”, so to speak, even though on review most of it isn’t material I’m all that excited for people to see. Regardless, it should be fun. See (some) of you in a few hours!

Lately, prompted subliminally by a conversation on the O-list, I have been folding money. I never really cared for money folding before, and I can’t say that this represents a change in my folding focus, but there’s something really fascinating in folding unique objects out of such a common, ubiquitous item. Folded last night, here’s a design based on a puff star tessellation: And a few days ago, I folded this design- two octagonal negative space stars, with radial kite shapes: It conveniently holds two half-dollar coins quite precisely in the “negative space” in the center. I’ll probably bring both of these to the convention, although I haven’t figured out a display method yet- I’m a little worried that someone will just swipe the dollar bills off the table. Anyone with money-folding + convention experience willing to give me a suggestion on display methodology for such things?

It’s official- I give up on trying to keep up to date on what’s new in the Origami Tessellations Photo Group on Flickr. There has been so much new material posted in the last few weeks that I can’t even look at it all, much less keep tabs on it to make some cohesive posts! You guys have been very busy, which is wonderful. We’ve had a number of new people join lately, and add a whole bunch of new and interesting work- warm welcomes to syngola, Lorenzo, mimickr, bentho, ckn.niwatori, and Jonathan Miller (by way of Brian Webb). If I missed you here I’m sorry, let me know and I’ll update my list here. Also good to see some posts from Andy Wilson, Kevin (and his super strong tessellations- check out how much weight his tessellations held up!) and Alex Bateman, who ventured out into "pre-creased gridland" to give it a try. His latest version of Tess is looking really sweet, which reminds me that I need to get to work and compile it …

It’s been one year since the Origami Tessellations photo pool was created, and we’re nearing 1000 photos with close to 100 members- with over 20 members who have actively contributed material to the group! This makes me really happy; when I started using Flickr a while back there really wasn’t origami tessellation content on here, and now there’s a healthy, growing community of friendly, fun people. This is all possible because of the positive, sharing spirit you have all shown to each other, and to new members joining in. I’d like to thank you all for being a part of something wonderful, and I hope we continue to share, contribute, and grow for years to come! Please feel free to comment on the discussion page on Flickr (or here, if you want!) -Eric