I’m going to the East Bay Origami Convention this weekend!  I’ll be teaching this model.

I specifically designed the model in order to teach it.  Normally, modular origami takes a while to make, and people wouldn’t finish within the session.  Especially something like this model which has 14 units.  But this is just about the fastest thing you could possibly make with 14 sheets of paper, so I’m hoping some people will be able to finish it.

The mathematically inclined may raise eyebrows at 14.  What symmetrical shape has 14 components?  And it’s pretty hard to tell from looking at it, because it’s so chaotic.  Ask me in the comments if you can’t figure it out.

I also made diagrams.

Today’s model is a tessellation that I folded at the Geometric Origami Convention in 2024.  That means we folded it within an hour and a half, not counting precreasing.  Very nice design, and potentially adjustable.  In principle, you could make spikes with any number of points, and have them spiderweb across the paper as you please.  For example, Aurélien has a model with the big dipper.

Personally, I look at these spikes, and I want to make them spiral!  Not sure if it’s possible within the design.

This is an original design that I made in 2019.  The instructions are lost to time.  I usually at least have some messy digital sketches, but I got nothing here.

Well, I recall a bit from memory.  This is one of those designs that follows a fairly braindead design pattern: throw lots of pieces of paper at it.  Each triangle?  Six separate sheets of paper.  I’m sure part of the reason I didn’t preserve instructions is that I was not so impressed with the design.  If I gave it another shot, I’m sure I could do better than that.

How did I think of linking four triangles?  Well, that’s nothing new.  There’s a very famous origami model called Four Intersecting Triangles by Tung Ken Lam.  (That model only uses three sheets per triangle.)  So, I just have a hole in each triangle.  It’s neat to assemble, because when you only have three linked triangles, they lie flat, and have a valknut topology.  Once you put in the fourth triangle, it is forced into a 3D configuration.

I later took this design, and made a 10 intersecting triangle version.  That design… was not terrific.  Maybe I’ll show it at some point.

Happy new year!

Back in 2017, I designed this tessellation based on the rhombile tiling, and I blogged about it here.  More recently, someone asked my permission to teach it in an origami convention.  I said, “Sure, but I only have crease patterns, no instructions.  Can you figure it out from there?”  This being an expert origamist, he figured it out alright, but he said it was very challenging.  I tried it myself, and I had to agree!

The challenge can be part of the fun, but I still wanted to make it a bit easier.  So I revisited the model to see what I could do.  I finally made some step-by-step instructions!  Very difficult to make instructions for tessellations, because every step involves multiple simultaneous folds.  I also added some steps to clean up the “edges” of the tessellation.  The result is what you see above.

2024 was a very artistically productive year for me.  I folded about 10 original designs, revisited my cube tessellation design, and made two group theory infographics. This is in addition to folding dozens of other people’s designs.  It helps a lot that I returned to origami meetups this year, which I had stopped attending during the pandemic.

This design is made by someone I know, a teenager that I see in the local origami space.  For him, this is a very simple design, something he can teach others in the space of an hour.  I often see him working on prototypes of much more complex designs, using massive yard-long paper.

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A few times before, I’ve posted origami failures, outtakes and disasters.  This time I’ll focus on some failed experiments–design ideas that didn’t quite work out.

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