Oschene provides wonderful instructions, in his slick Sequenced Crease Pattern style, on how to make yourself a regular pentagon or decagon from a square sheet of paper. If you’ve ever tried to fold pentagons or decagons, you might know that they are irritatingly difficult to work with, inspiring all sorts of bad language to come forth after the 5th or 6th attempt to fold them properly. So I’m very happy to see an easy to follow set of instructions on how to save myself a whole lot of pain. Thanks, Phillip! You can get the diagram instructions from his website. (As he pushes the limits of sane blog header lengths in the process. What a URL!)

Octagon Tessellation Originally uploaded by cati1ine. Andy Wilson folded this marvelous octagonal tessellation pattern out of glassine. It’s based directly on a design from Chris Palmer’s website, Shadowfolds. (not there anymore, though.) I’m really happy to see more designs like this- as I continue to try to better understand higher geometries and how they all come together, seeing wonderful examples like this helps for me to comprehend things in a better way. Sometimes having a great visual clue does more than any book full of text can do. He’s also right about working with glassine- it really, really helps to see the underlying structures in the designs. I highly recommend trying it, especially if you’re not just doing straight grid-based tessellation designs. Thanks, Andy, for sharing this great work with us! -Eric (P.S. – two weeks from today, we’re leaving for Brazil! at the end of the month is the Tessellation Expo at the Botanical Gardens in Brasilia; if by some odd chance you’re in the area, stop by! or check this website again for …

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?