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 2:9.5, and that doesn’t come out the same.
I’ll post some photos of the larger version when I eventually get around to wetfolding it all, but that might take a bit of time. There’s also the matter of excess paper that needs some ornamentation but I have yet to decide what to do with it, so until a solution presents itself it is living in the “unfinished” box… which is getting rather full, these days.
I called this design “Pecten Magellanicus”, named after the sea scallop, which it reminds me of. Since the fold itself is thick and 3D, it has a very strong resemblance to this little shellfish, even if the geometry is a little off.