Origomi - Eric Gjerde's weblog on Origami & etc.

I posted a little link on the Origami Forum, located here:

http://www.thekhans.me.uk/phpBB2 (there was a LOT more link there I trimmed out!)

I came across this web forum of origami people! including quite a few people I know, like Gila, John McKeever, Boaz Shuval, etc. (I suppose "know" is being used here in a very casual way!) I'm hoping that I can have some interesting conversations on there. I hope I can wrangle Owesen to sign up if he ever shows up again around these parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_group this covers every regular and semiregular tessellation that we can fold, I think. or all the possible orientations. I haven't thought through all the ramifications of this, but I'm pretty sure that anything that we can fold fits one of these models. things get a little more complicated topologically since the paper isn't really "flat", and there's more dimensions to the folding, but that's rather beyond me.

I found this through my technorati RSS feed for "tessellations"; it's "Makoto Nakamura's Tessellation World". it has some really neat animated tessellation scenes, and some rather unique ideas. definitely worth a look. it's all in Flash, so be forwarned if you are flash-free.

Christiane has a really slick new triangular tessellation online, as well as some great star models based on one of owesen's puffy star shapes. check it out!

decided to try an escher-style tessellation again after some discussion on the Origami mailing list. this is, obviously, a rather simple model, but something more complex would take more time than I have right now.

this model tessellates across the plane, although it requires two differently sized triangles to fill in some gaps. you can see the tiling pattern here.

I know they don't really look all that much like fish (more like goldfish crackers, if you're from the US) but it's what came to mind. I came up with some more complex figures made up of larger groups of shapes; I'll try to give some of those a go at a later point in time.

All my diagrams that exist are available online at: www.origamitessellations.com. I only have 4 documents up there currently, but there are more in the works. If I come up with some better fish tessellations I'll make sure to diagram them!

folding curves, made by the intersection of two radiating points in space.

really ugly paper for an octagonal star twist. but this is what the first tier looks like...

bees make some very excellent hexagons, too.

trying to generate a proper set of spiral twists. the circles aren't correctly spaced here, I need something logarithmic and more "phi"-ish.

Phi is a cool number!

some great original star/geometric origami artwork by Carmen Sprung. web page in german.

http://www.origamiseiten.de/o_home.html

new funky thing in the works. more to come later.

OK, so it's doable. this one isn't very pretty, though. definitely a work in progress!

I can't figure out how to collapse the star tips properly- all the angles involved are confusing and non-obvious to a certain extent. we'll see, I guess.

Christiane Bettens has some more tessellation photos- a nice version of the spread hex fold. thanks for sharing it with us!

http://origami-art.org/gallery/Tessellations!

very, very hacked together crease pattern. I'm pasting my notes from the entry here...

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this was a really poor chop job I did in illustrator so I had something to reference as I folded. I realize the lines don't match up at all, but I'm working off a hand-generated set of pre-creases anyway so this is really more of a visual guide than anything. it's a little trickier than the hexagonal star twist, although much of the thought process is the same. there's a lot more excess material due to the sharper angles involved so it's quite a bit more unwieldy. I'm glad I didn't jump straight to the dodecagon twist like I had originally been thinking!

Look for a formalized CP and document release of this model sometime... next week? not sure when, I guess whenever I get around to it :)

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el suyo era un trabajo realmente pobre de la tajada que hice en ilustrador así que tenía algo que referirme mientras que doblé. Realizo que las líneas no emparejan para arriba en todos, pero estoy trabajando de un sistema mano-generado de pre-pliegues de todos modos así que éste es realmente más de una guía visual que cualquier cosa él es una poco más difícil que la torcedura hexagonal de la estrella, aunque mucho del proceso del pensamiento es igual allí es material mucho más exceso debido a los ángulos más agudos implicó así que es absolutamente un pedacito más poco manejable. ¡Estoy alegre yo no salté derecho a la torcedura del dodecagon como había estado pensando originalmente!

¿Busque un CP formalizado y documente el lanzamiento de esta semana del modelo alguna vez... después? no seguro cuando, conjeturo siempre que le consiga alrededor.

it's a dragon foot! or something!

.... no, it's actually the first 3 points of an octagonal star twist. this is practice paper, and it's just testing- I promise I'm normally more precise about this!

tomusan on Flickr posted this today- it's a really slick looking iso-area tessellation. I don't know much else about it, but it's really slick! it looks vaguely Correia-like.

I uploaded a pile of photos of octagonal origami twists in various states of construction. nothing fancy, just a bunch of snaps that I was taking while playing around with some folds in case I "broke" something and had to go back to photos for reference.

they are located at a semi-permament (until I get a new gallery template) location: www.origamitessellations.com/gallery/origami-octagonal-twist/.

Wow, I was browsing some of my favorite origami sites checking for updates and I saw this:

I was so pleased! John McKeever's tessellation and other origami work are just mind blowing, so needless to say I felt quite happy to see him fold one of my patterns. It pales in comparison to his other folds, though. check them out!

and in case you've stumbled across this from the big bad internet, here's a link to the instructions for the Spread Hexagon Tessellation at www.origamitessellations.com.

(sorry for the gratuitous plug there, but I figured more info is better than less info...)

Diagrams for this simple octagonal twist are available online at: http://www.origamitessellations.com/octagon/.

it's a simple model, just sharing it for the fun of it more than anything. take a look!

Found via the OrigamiBrasil mailing list, here's a gallery of folds done by Danny Gomez. He's apparently quite the tattoo artist, as well, since this is on a subsection of his tattoo site.

http://dannytattoo.com/origami/

take a peek!

My wife folded a nice model of an elephant at our origami minnesota meeting last sunday. very cute!

made using gold and silver flecked momogami.

my second foray into octagons. a little better, although the folding method for all this takes a little getting used to. since an octagon is not a "pure" tessellat-able polygon (can't use it to fill the plane just by itself) all the creases don't necessarily line up to make things you might want to make.

that being said, it's really a lot like two sets of squares, rotated by 45 degrees with respect to each other. this gets a little confusing as the crease pattern can look a LOT like normal squares w/ 45 degree diagonals, but it's not- most of the creases never match up in any "proper" spots that you think they might. They do, however, do a lot of interesting things, which I'm going to have to take some time to explore.

One very interesting thing that I noticed is that the octagon repeats itself- growing outward in a linear fashion, each set of creases makes another larger octagon. This is interesting, of course, as it seems to lend itself to making "tower" shaped patterns ala Chris Palmer and his flower towers. I have no desire to reinvent the wheel, so I'm going to avoid that particular shape unless I come across it by accident.

so, the next step is to try to tessellate this... and oddly enough, I have sheets of vellum (translucent paper) in 30cm x 30cm size. I'm turning into a backlit tessellation freak. well, I'm not, I promise, but I'm sure Owesen would read this with much distaste. My wife bought the paper so I don't need an excuse here as to why I have it :)

an interesting pattern, this one, and probably something I can/should diagram. it's relatively easy, I think, but I'm going to have to knock down the number of prefolds first. most of the ones I made aren't necessary.

Anyone interested in having this model diagrammed? it's a simple, single octagonal twist, but it seems to be popular for reasons I don't understand.
If you're interested in having me diagram it, drop me a line and let me know:
origomi@mac.com

I was playing around with octagonal twists, and came up with this little shape. it looked neat.

I tagged this as tessellations, which isn't exactly true; but it will become one for sure.

folding octagonal stuff is sort of a pain, but I'll have to figure it out... something new to know!

Danilo sent me a bunch of photos of his attempt at the Tiled Hex Tessellation. They came out very, very well! He used some insanely thin tissue paper (or some sort of crepe-like thin stuff) to fold it. the texture is fabulous. very Snazzy!

I really dig it when people send me photos of some of my models they have folded- it's a great feeling. and there's nothing wrong with things that make you feel happy!



Here's a link to Christiane's photo gallery- take a minute to poke around some of the other great photo pages there too.

http://origami-art.org

Thanks, Christiane!

So I read a great little blurb in Make Magazine that talked about using Minwax Wood Hardener to turn things like cardboard into a plastic-like substance. the minwax product is basically plastics suspended in a solvent which evaporates once it's penetrated the wood (or paper, cardboard, brushes, fabric, etc...) and leaves the plastics behind. more or less, anyway.

I finally picked up some and I tried it out this morning. I think it will work! The origami I was coating seemed to suck it up pretty easily. the chiyogami and heavier papers did much better than the really thin shiny stuff, but that's to be expected.

here's a handy tip- don't try to pour some into a styrofoam cup. big mistake! it starts bubbling and eats right through the styrofoam in a second. I'll post some photos of the whole process to my flickr account later- it's www.flickr.com/photos/origomi. I'm still waiting for the first layers to dry, after which we'll see how well it worked or not.

-Eric