Teaching at Origami USA Convention, NYC June 2007 Originally uploaded by EricGjerde. Bekah and I are heading to NYC tomorrow morning, to do a little touristing and personal meet-ups before the Origami USA convention June 22-25 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. I will be teaching two classes, one complex class on folding tessellations from this scallop shell unit, and one intermediate class on "tessellation basics". To that end, I whipped together a little booklet covering a few of the basic concepts, using some materials and ideas from my upcoming book. It’s really just a bit of a taste of the topic, but I wanted to help people grasp some of the simple bits, so the class would be a bit easier to teach- teaching is hard work, and I get easily sidetracked. I will be posting a version of the 8 page booklet online after the convention, once I have an opportunity to shake out anything that the class (or others) feel is a little confusing, needs clarification, etc. Jamie Kelley of …

Foil FIT Originally uploaded by lilzabubba. My wife Bekah folded this wonderful model of Tom Hull’s the other afternoon, to display at the OUSA convention in NYC in a few weeks. I have always considered this to be one of the really difficult designs out there, and yet she did it in just a few hours. I’m glad she doesn’t fold tessellations or I’d be out of a job! 🙂

Artist Olafur Eliasson created this piece, a laser-cut negative space rendering of his house in 85:1 scale: Your House It’s made of 454 slices, bound together in a book. Apparently it was quite a difficult process to put together, due to the complex constraints that were put upon the paper. From what I understand it was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. The folks that produced the book are a laser-cutting house that specializes in paper-cutting, called Visionen in Papier (Visions in Paper). I’m actually even more interested in what they are capable of doing, and the kinds of services they provide- check out some of their other examples of their work. As this piece combines books, paper cutting, laser cutters, architecture, and paper making, it hits a broad area of things I really enjoy- so I pass it along to you, readers, in the hope you find it interesting as well. (All images copyright www.kremo.de) Link from Бунт Архитекторов!, my favorite Russian website!

An alert Flickr friend let me know that my book appeared on Amazon.com: Origami Tessellations: Fantastic Paper Geometry   I’m interested to see it listed, although it’s still in the final stages of layout and all that fun stuff. The “cover” shown is not the final one, but just the mock-up created for the catalog; I don’t know yet what the final cover will look like. The final ship date is earlier than Jan 1, 2008- I hope, anyway- but nevertheless it’s not that far away, considering how much work still remains to be done on the publisher’s side of things. Here’s the blurb text from Amazon, which (I’m guessing) is something that was written for the catalog that Lark sends out to all prospective purchasers. Tessellations—shapes repeated over and over to fill a plane without overlapping—have inspired beautiful art, from intricate tile work to M.C. Escher’s playful graphics. Now, master origami artist Eric Gjerde has produced the same stunning kaleidoscopic patterns simply by folding paper! His awe-inspiring collection—the first of its kind—explores the creative …