I’ve been busy with some projects the last few weeks, and have really been out of touch with what’s happening lately. But I was very pleased to hear this morning from Philip that Joel Cooper has a blog! It’s great to see him have more of a web presence, as I see a pretty constant smattering of hits from people looking for him and his work- now there’s somewhere more concrete for them to see. (You’d think people could track down his contact info via Flickr, but somehow that rarely seems to happen- go figure.) So congrats on the new undertaking, Joel, I’m looking forward to seeing new things from you! And I heartily encourage anyone else who is folding on a regular basis to consider starting a website/blog/etc to have a “home” for your web presence- it helps to connect people to you, and gives others a centralized starting point to refer to. This is a big plus, and very helpful for folks who want to find your work. Good all around!

Announcing a new version of Tess (1.4) Originally uploaded by Paper Mosaics. Alex Bateman has released a new version of his landmark software, Tess. Tess allows you to create all sorts of tilings, and modifications of those tilings- so you can explore possibilities without having to fold it all out in paper, first! Also, this new version provides PDF export capability, which is a major plus for windows users. Tess is a Perl application, and will run on any Perl-capable system with a bit of tweaking. (This means you, Linux/FreeBSD/MacOSX users.) Or, if you’re running windows, you can download a standalone version, which will run on it’s own without requiring any Perl resources. Both of these are available to download from Alex’s website. Download the latest version of Tess!

Lotus Originally uploaded by tekuila. I found this origamic architecture piece really quite beautiful- from my flickr contact tekuila. Wonderful color choices and a great design. I love seeing these kinds of things.

little face Originally uploaded by origami joel. There’s been a lot of “nano-tessellations” folded on the Origami Tessellations group on Flickr lately; Joel Lorenzo Marchi started this madness off a while back, and the ante keeps being upped by various people folding smaller and smaller designs. (See some other patterns from Ralf Konrad, for example.) But of course Joel came back with this: part of a mask, folded from tiny, tiny pleats, less than 4cm across for the whole piece. Wow. That’s really quite something!