Pecten magellanicus, work sketch Originally uploaded by EricGjerde. I’ve been spending way too much time lately exploring pleated, three-dimensional structures. With this little fold, I was wanting to see a 3D shell-like fan shaped piece; it’s not really quite what I was looking for, but it’s also interesting, so I left it as-is with the intention of trying to make another one later. After wetfolding it a bit (to assist with the thick pleats at the center) the shape kind of grew on me. I recently folded a much larger sheet of 4 of these shapes- essentially a tessellation of this design. It is nice, but I wasn’t quite happy with how it turned out- there’s a really complicated bit of magic involved with how the pleats + diagonal creases work out, so even if your rectangles are off by a tiny bit you don’t get the same result. In this design, the ratio of the rectangles is 2:9, for reference, which seems to work the best; the larger example I made is more like …

Yuko Nishimura Ripoff Originally uploaded by Owesen. Fredrik Owesen did some reverse-engineering of the folding techniques mastered by Yuko Nishimura, a long-time favorite of mine. (if you like pleating and tessellations, Nishimura is probably also a favorite of yours, too!) Fredrik gave a little description of how to accomplish this type of folding: I’ll try to write up some sort of how-to, although I suspect they tend to be confusing. I’ve grown pretty lazy in terms of folding methods lately, so this will be based on that. You begin by drawing the crease pattern on the sheet you want to fold, using a sharpish ballpointpen, one without ink or a color matched to the paper is good. First lines divide the sheet in long rectangular lines (1). Turn the sheet, then using some sort of curved guide (found a cheap flexible ruler well suited for the purpose), fill in the curves that go between the lines from the previous step. Use the lines you just drew, both curved and straight, to mark up a grid …

Circus Circus Originally uploaded by lilzabubba. I’m fascinated by the complex geometric patterns involved in this traditional Japanese embroidery craft. It’s all types of tessellations of the sphere, which is utterly different than the flat plane tessellations I work on- so things like pentagons are able to tile without difficulty. I must admit I’m a little envious of how nicely things tile on the surface of a sphere. I think perhaps we are missing some of the intriguing geometric connections that the world is offering us! I’m a big fan of flickr Temari crafter lilzabubba, who seems to make a new one of these every other day. A good mental break from the tyranny of the two dimensional plane of existence.

Propellerheads Originally uploaded by EricGjerde. We’ve been talking a lot in the Origami Tessellations group on Flickr about “flagstone” tessellations, so named by Joel Cooper for their distinctive look. They are a favorite of his, and since his work is where we were introduced to the concept, the name seems quite appropriate. There’s a lot of weird folding voodoo that goes on with these folds, which we’ve all been trying to figure out and explain; some of us much better than others- Peter, Lorenzo, and Jorge having more luck here due to their mathematical orientation. I’ve noticed a strange correlation between iso-area folds and the “flagstone” process, and in trying to understand it I started folding a simple, offset iso-area square twist (seen in the picture above). However, since I’m folding with elephant hide, it has a very nice sculptural quality to it, and makes some very nice curved shapes. So I “froze” the squashing process half way, making these rather interesting 3d puffs. I like the way it introduces a curving element to the …