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!)

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 …

Playing around with different angles, came up with this interesting modification on an old favorite. It’s iso-area, has several layers to it (in a Joel Cooper-esque way, to me) and is a bit different than anything I’ve folded before. There’s something unique in the way that you can manipulate pleats to get extra layers of paper moving around in there. This is a new area of exploration for me. Would look good, no doubt, from elephant hide. I’ll give it a try once my latest order shows up. For the curious, I put up a fancy crease pattern document in PDF format available for download from my website.

I just uploaded a new PDF of instructions for folding a Double Pleat Hexagon tessellation; you can download it here. It is released under the CC Non-Commercial Attribution license, which means you can do anything you want with it, other than sell it for $$$, or go around saying it’s your own. (which hopefully you’d be nice enough to not do anyway!) Let me know what you think. Thanks! -Eric Gjerde

I received a wonderful email from Aldo Tolino– ionoi on flickr- with a link to a YouTube video he created that teaches you how to crumple paper, Vincent Floderer-style. He says that he learned this technique last year at the Salzburg Origami Masters exhibition, in a class taught by Paul Jackson. (who apparently taught this technique to Floderer, as well!) I really can’t believe that it’s this easy to do! so much fun. This was my first attempt, using a spare napkin laying around the office kitchen. The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bla5c5THSoI