Month: November 2006

Arms of Shiva, flagstone version (crease pattern)

Published by ericgjerde

This is a crease pattern of one of my designs[1][2] (which for the sake of convenience I have dubbed ‘Arms of Shiva’.) However, this takes that design and throws it through the flagstonization machine, hinge-pleating all the folds to make the pattern you see above. While it might look like it is very wasteful of space (it is) there’s still less wasted paper doing it via this method than our normal straight pleat-and-twist methodology. Go figure! I would love to see this folded, in case there’s anyone out there feeling intrepid enough to give it a try… (update: I folded it, eventually!)

Thinking Sketches – 3.4.6.4 Waterbomb-Flagstone Tessellation

Published by ericgjerde

Here’s a rudimentary sketch of a 3.4.6.4 “Flagstone” tessellation. Formed by creating the initial “waterbomb” type collapses, and then twisted to form the familiar flagstone style tiling. I did not draw the lines for the WB collapses but I’m guessing you can figure this out if you have any idea what I’m talking about, right? More info on all this soon. I’m writing something down but I keep finding myself hamstrung by lack of proper wording and also some gaps in understanding. In the little box sketches in the upper right, you can find two examples of a rhombus tiling (the dual of the 3.6.3.6 tessellation) that have been done as a normal straight-pleat tessellation, and then as a flagstone style tessellation. If we adhere to using just the grid and it’s main offset lines (in this case, 30 degree angles) the flagstone style pleating is more efficient in terms of total area that one can tessellate given a particular number of pleats. Of course, the hinges that connect the flagstone polygons together can be …

Pecten Magellanicus, Redux

Published by ericgjerde

Pecten Magellanicus, Redux Originally uploaded by EricGjerde. A while back I folded a three-dimensional shell shape from some pleats, which I called “Pecten Magellanicus” (Sea Scallop), mostly due to the fact that it really looked like one. I really liked the initial piece I did, and I wanted to see it realized on a larger scale. There’s a lot of pleating involved, so I decided to start off by folding four of them together, and then see where I wanted to take it from that point. Here’s the initial version: Pecten magellanicus, work sketch However, in creating the second version, I didn’t properly sort out the ratios for the pleats. On the initial sketch, the rectangles that are used to create the pleat fan have a ratio of 2:9, for width:length. This made the shell shape fold almost flat when made with 7 pleats. On the larger version, I made a miscalculation and it ended up closer to a ratio of 1:5, which means the pleat fan extends farther upwards and is not as close …

Origami Tessellations now supplies updates via email

Published by ericgjerde

So, in case you would prefer to receive an email with new content vs. checking this website from a feedreader (or actually visiting the site directly, for that matter) I have turned on a feature of FeedBurner which will deliver a daily email to you if and ONLY if there is new content on this site. If you are so inclined to subscribe to this, you can click on the link in the upper right of the web page (the part that says “Subscribe to Origami Tessellations via Email”, hopefully that is self explanatory…) Or, you can use this form: Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner I’ve long thought about turning this on, but I’ve only gotten around to it now. sign up if you like!

Living under the Sea, A Zombie Sealife Dream

Published by ericgjerde

Living under the Sea Originally uploaded by EricGjerde. I read a strange article about “whale fall” yesterday, and part of the discussion involved specialized species that capitalize on such events. The one that really caught my eye was “bone eating zombie worms”. So, needless to say, I had bizarre dreams last night about what a bone-eating zombie worm would look like, and this morning while working on some paperfolding I ended up with this purely by accident. It looks a little friendly, so perhaps it’s a vegetarian zombie worm? No doubt it has nothing in common with the carnivorous bone-eating variety, but it looked enough like an ocean worm of some sort for my tastes. What sort of interesting intermediate shapes do you come across while folding? I always like to play with the pleated paper like this before I go on to fold other things with it. Maybe sometimes it’s OK for us to just stop at this point and admire it as-is?