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

I've merged the content from my origomi.blogspot.com blog site and my origamitessellations.com site, into a single location. I now have active, working RSS feeds, and all sorts of other good things. I'm particularly excited about how much easier it is for me to add items, which means I'm much more likely to keep things up to date.

One feature I really like is the flickr photo gallery plugin, which allows me to display all my latest flickr photos in a convenient in-site gallery. check it out here.

However, there is a downside: for the time being I am unable to provide Portuguese translations of all my pages, although all diagram documents will be translated (with help from my Brasilian friends!)

Meus apologies, origamigos!

So, if you've been reading this website, or checking it occasionally- please hop over to www.origamitessellations.com. that's where everything will be from now on.

This is a good change, really, and I think it will be an improvement overall. I'm still getting the hang of the WordPress blog system, but so far it's working for me.

Thanks for your time and interest, everyone! I appreciate it greatly.

-Eric Gjerde

I first saw Ralf's Origami Page a while back, and I really liked his hexagonal tessellation work- but I've only really discovered the breadth of it lately. Here are a few links showing off his great artwork.


http://ditelo.itc.it/people/gretter/brannenburg05/modelli_s/IMG_3256.html

http://ditelo.itc.it/people/gretter/brannenburg05/modelli_s/IMG_3254.html

and, of course, this one- the most interesting I have seen yet.

http://ditelo.itc.it/people/gretter/tassellazioni/konrad.html





do those look familiar? and this is from 2003! looks like we all got scooped here by Ralf. Although I would suspect we're all just refolding designs by Fujimoto, anyway...

Philip (a newly found origami folder to me) posted this spectacular Phi based fold, which is something like a flower/rose/box thing. Phi rocks my world, but I'm utterly unable to fold complex things out of it- something I'm still working on (pentagonal geometry isn't the easiest thing to work with at times).

He also has crease patterns here so you can fold it! I'd suggest popping over and taking a look. His origami blog is also fascinating as well, and is a new RSS feed for me to take in on a daily basis going forward!

The Fitful Flog: Pentagonal Compass Rose Box and φ-Quiddity

my origami friend Claudia will be on TV in Brasil talking about origami! make sure you tune in and watch. (there's a link to watch the streaming video feed online!)

I am glad I work with Brasilians, as someone can translate for me while I am watching!

I am really impressed with this solution for collapsing together a hexagonal pleat set. when you have a two-pleat-wide raised section (as in the photo) collapsing them all together is a very difficult process, and she's come up with an elegant way to do it.

Hoping to see more of this soon!

Mélisande has a great new tessellation posted today! It's got two sets of hexagonal shapes, locked together in a triangular symmetry. very beautiful!

My favorite part is the swirling arms, which look like propeller blades or windmills spinning in the wind.

a slightly different attack on the triangle thing. can you tell that when I mentally envision something, I have to create it or it drives me nuts? this design is giving me stress, and I want to complete it and be done with it already.

regardless, here is a modified base, folded from a sheet of treated unryu. it's actually one of the scrap pieces left over from my testing process, which explains the random edges, etc.

it's very lovely paper, and is great to fold- it's extremely thin, but treating it properly makes it stiff and springy. much more so than standard kami (the paper you buy in a pack of 100 from the paper store.)

Something else worth noting here- on the star version of this fold, you're taking a pattern with hexagonal symmetry which gives you 6 shapes (thusly, 6 triangles). if you try the same methodology with triangular symmetry, you get 3 shapes with 6 sides. I suppose this is rather obvious, but it's still interesting to see it play out this way.

on the larger version of this that I did (here), I ended up with some odd hexagonal shapes on the bottom that became larger and larger as my folds progressed.

I need to refold this newer variant on larger paper that is more forgiving, so I can do better manipulation of my crease points and all the complicated sinks.

So I had a hard time finding out what sort of Methyl Cellulose I should use on thin paper like unryu (like washi, made with mulberry or something similar). MC makes it stiff- you get it as a powder and mix it up, apply it, let it dry, etc.

I got a great tip from someone on the Origami-L mailing list to use Sodium Carboxymethyl Cellulose, which apparently dries stiffer than regular methyl cellulose. I'm not a chemist (that's my wife!) so I really wouldn't know, but I checked out the place he recommended. it was $26.95 for a 100g bottle, which would have lasted quite a while but seemed expensive to the cheap old man inside me.

So having put this off for a while (and I picked up a large supply of great papers that need it!) I happened across something this weekend that seems to solve my problem.

at my parent's house, working down in my dad's woodshop, I noticed a can of "spray starch" he uses to make his work shirts press flat and stiff. I looked at the ingredients list, and lo and behold- besides water and propellant, the main ingredient was none other than Sodium Carboxymethyl Cellulose.

I tested it out on paper- sprayed it with the stuff (called "Magic Sizing") and ironed it flat using a normal clothes iron (use a sheet of linen or other smooth thin cloth between your iron and the paper or you'll get starchy stuff all over the iron. yuck.)

it makes for VERY flat and smooth paper, but very springy and strong. it's a joy to fold. and there's really not much waiting for it to dry, as it takes about 3 minutes to really soak in, and then about 2 or 3 minutes to iron it flat and dry.

the best part? the stuff in the spray can cost about $1, and it's a big can!

or maybe the best part is the lovely laundry smell the paper has after you're done. (I'm looking for "fragrance free" spray, but haven't found any yet.)

I tested several different brands of "spray starch", and only the Magic Sizing brand specifically lists the methyl cellulose in the ingredients. the others probably have something similar, but it's just listed as "polymers" etc. they seem to work about the same, though, so I wouldn't worry about it too much if you can't find this particular brand.

I tested various levels of application (ranging from a light spray to a full soaking) but there's only so much MC the paper can absorb, so the supersoaking doesn't do much other than make your ironing work harder. Also, if the paper gets too wet, it becomes very difficult to eliminate wrinkles, etc.

Ironing larger sheets (1m squared) becomes tricky, but I'm working on a process for that. it's not really solved yet, though.

I'm working on better documentation for this whole process, so if it's interesting for you I'd suggest waiting until I'm finished.

you are also, of course, welcome to contact me any time, at origomi@mac.com.

new-to-flickr origami tessellation folder infinite-origami is working on an interesting new tessellation he's calling a "popcorn twist".

it looks somewhat like the owesen puffy star thing, but is more like a tower with what looks to be a solid locking mechanism on the bottom giving it more structural integrity.

should be interesting to see how this folds out for him! pop over and take a look.

Fooling around with some of the same folding concepts behind the star twist v2.1. interestingly enough, doing the same process with a triangle base yields odd hexagonal shapes as one grows increasingly larger.

However, so far they are overly clumsy, and multiple attempts have not found a more desirable folding method. too much extra paper on the reverse so far. time to unfold and try a different attack.

Folded the original design out of unryu, which was much more compliant for such a layered concept- this sheet of standard kami is giving up the ghost.

look for a future photoset detailing a simple method of producing wonderful tessellation paper, soon!

Mélisande brings this amazing artwork to us on flickr, and shatters my mental picture of what is possible and expected from "origami tessellation" pieces.

Is it a tessellation? is it geometric art? is it both? is it neither? I don't know how to categorize this piece, as I have never seen anything similar to it before. As I mentioned in an initial brief comment on her photo page on Flickr, this is a very moving piece that is reminiscent of many schools of artistic thought and design, as well as different time periods of human history. It reminds me of both Modern design, and ancient paintings on the walls of forgotten civilizations. This is fascinating to me.

I can only hope to see more works like this from Mélisande, and draw inspiration from them.

Beautiful art refreshes and uplifts the soul.

This is a piece that I have been working on for a while now- it's the latest version of my star twist tessellation. (it will fill the plane, eventually!)

It uses a logarithmic growth pattern to create a sequence of triangles that follow the fibonacci sequence in their growth, or at least as much as I can predict without folding further and further towards infinity.

here's the cut and pasted flickr description text:

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This is based on my original star twist, but is taken quite a bit further.

Have you ever started folding something, which was interesting and complex, only to later realize it was something you had folded before? And you just spent quite a bit of time finding another way to get there?

I realized after folding the star twist version 2 (found here) that it was really the same as my original star twist, but just folded differently to allow for the relatively complex folding sequence. When I started folding my first version back in the spring, I had not explored logarithmic folding or really much of anything yet. Now that I have a few months of research and exploration under my belt, I am able to better recognize what I'm doing. This is a positive thing, in my opinion.

Anyhow, this design uses a pattern based on a lot of triangles, which expand in a logarithmic progression. very pleasing to fold, if not a little bit complicated. Now that I have a few folded, it's time to disassemble one and build a crease pattern for it. Future attempts should be easier once I know what parts are not required for actual folding, as well as producing a cleaner overall design.

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This is based on my original star twist, but is taken quite a bit further.

Have you ever started folding something, which was interesting and complex, only to later realize it was something you had folded before? And you just spent quite a bit of time finding another way to get there?

I realized after folding the star twist version 2 (found here) that it was really the same as my original star twist, but just folded differently to allow for the relatively complex folding sequence. When I started folding my first version back in the spring, I had not explored logarithmic folding or really much of anything yet. Now that I have a few months of research and exploration under my belt, I am able to better recognize what I'm doing. This is a positive thing, in my opinion.

Anyhow, this design uses a pattern based on a lot of triangles, which expand in a logarithmic progression. very pleasing to fold, if not a little bit complicated. Now that I have a few folded, it's time to disassemble one and build a crease pattern for it. Future attempts should be easier once I know what parts are not required for actual folding, as well as producing a cleaner overall design.

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grabbed from the Flickr photo entry.

I uploaded quite a few pictures of this model, but I find it to be rather entertaining, and certainly quite pretty. I don't think these photos did the design justic- it looks best backlit by the sun, but sadly there was no sun to be had today!

tweaked some of the folding choices and came out with a better design. it's actually all a bunch of diamonds, getting progressively larger following a Fibonacci sequence. interesting numbers, for sure. even when I'm not trying to fold something using them, I keep finding them popping up.

This design is a (logarithmically?) growing shape, which gets increasingly larger each time you change sides of the paper. My intention is to find a method of folding this all on one side, but for the time being this is where we are at.

it uses the normal 60 degree precreased grid for one side of the star, and the other side is based on a 60 degree grid that is offset by 30 degrees. This means that the stars are offset to each other, and don't match up in any way, other than some odd geometry which I don't quite understand yet.

Like other models (like the Fujimoto Lotus or Hydrangea) this item can be folded infinitely larger, as it keeps expanding to larger and larger sizes. I think, in fact, that it will grow using a logarithmic scale (I guess it must to do this) but I don't know the details on what number it will be. I have ideas, but I'd rather keep folding and see how it turns out first; although I think it follows the Fibonacci sequence (my personal favorite.)

however, it's rather neat how the sides go back and forth; this would be a great model folded with some tissue foil- when it's not pressed flat it looks like a flower blossom.

I've been told this looks like my star twist, which is very true. I think this is that design but without all the bungling of extra paper. maybe I should call it star twist v2?

this is a work in progress, but I thought I'd share this interesting item with you. I hope to release an updated version soon. As always, your comments are very welcome.

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(description lifted word-for-word from my flickr post.)

an update on this- it's an origami display in Barcelona, Spain.

the info from mourazul on flickr:

"It's in Barcelona, at the end of the "Ramblas".

Just ask for the "wax museum", and you'll find it!"

Flowers (and many if not most things in nature) can be found to have geometric properties that are aligned with the number Φ (Phi). It's one of those numbers, like Pi, that are endless non-repeating numbers; Phi is, approximately, 1.618034. it really goes on endlessly, though.

The geometry of the pentagon and all related shapes that use the same angles tend to have a natural affinity for both Phi and phi (lowercase) which is equivalent to 1 over Phi, or 1/Φ. this, oddly enough, is equal to Phi-1, or 0.618034.

This is also the number that makes up the "golden ratio", long known and used for it's great geometrical qualities.

you can find out more information here, or just do a google search for Phi and the golden ratio.

Here's a good entry on Phi in plants.

This photo really represents this concept quite well, and it's something that is so simple for nature but yet so difficult to try and recreate!

I feel there is a lot of undiscovered folding territory in Phi, and I hope to explore this as time goes on.

New flickr foldr infinite-origami has a great hexagonal/triangular tessellation going here. please check it out!

Jane (mawelucky on flickr) folded this great star tessellation, based on Mélisande's instructional crease pattern.

this makes three people I know who can fold this! I find it to be too difficult, and I get overly tempted to squash the stars flat. Of course, they look best when nicely folded into 3d shapes.

if you like this model, check out this version of it, folded by Mélisande:

Gila has a wonderful kawasaki-style twist tessellation, which to my colorblind eyes looks like it's glowing in the dark.

She says it's what got her started in origami! I'm glad she got into folding, as her work is very interesting and unique.

Check out this photo, and the others next to it in mourazul's photostream. not sure where it is, or really any other details- but it's a great concept! hopefully I can find out more...