This is a tessellation by David Huffman, which I took directly from an academic article titled “Reconstructing David Huffman’s Origami Tessellations“.  It’s a great starting point if you want to fold 3-dimensional tessellations, or at least it would be if anyone made tutorials for it.  I’m shocked that this tessellation isn’t more widely known.

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I’m out travelling, but I brought some origami paper to fold.  I got this model from the 5th Geometric Origami Convention, and folded it on the train.  It’s essentially a variant of the herringbone tessellation, but slightly shifted so that it makes a shape like a sea urchin.

This is a pleat-based design, similar to other designs I’ve posted before.  They’re fairly simple to fold on the spot and improvise.  This probably took me like 20 minutes to fold, but I like the idea.

So what’s the idea behind this one?  I fold the paper into 16 divisions… and also 15 divisions.  So the outermost pleat is 1/16 – 1/15 = 1/240.  The next pleat is 2/16 – 2/15 = 2/240, and so on.  So the pleats are very small towards the edge of the paper, and very large towards the center.  Ever since I demonstrated this idea to myself, I’ve been wondering how I can apply it to make more complex designs.

How do I fold 15 divisions, you ask?  I have some diagrams here, but I’ve been thinking for a while I ought to make some clearer diagrams.

I got this drawer box from something called the Practical Origami Convention.  I didn’t actually attend the convention, but happened to access the models later, and picked this one out to fold.  I have to imagine that there are a bunch of origamists making “practical” designs like tiny chairs to sit on, and tiny tables to hold tiny flowers.  (I’m joking, I know that practical origami has a lot of emphasis on boxes and envelopes.)

I can’t remember how many sheets this needed, but it was over 10.  Each drawer is a separate sheet, with another sheet to be used as lining.  The cabinet box (I had to look up what this part of the drawer is called) is made of 4 pieces, or maybe more?

Now obviously there’s a lot of origami that stretches what you would think is possible with a single sheet.  But other designs are more sheet-maximalist, with multiple distinct units working together.  There’s some complexity in that; you need to make the sizes match, accounting for the thickness of the paper, and some units need to be firmly attached to each other.

Here’s a horse I folded at a conference many years ago.  It’s meant to stand on its hind legs, although you’d really need to attach it to a stand.

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Here’s a really old design of mine, back in 2013.  I wanted a simple origami bookmark–no frills, just mark my page please.  Some origami bookmarks stick out of the book, and that’s obviously not practical if I’m throwing the book in my bag or something.

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I made this a couple months ago in an origami workshop with Goran Konjevod.  The subject of the workshop was how to pleat paper without pre-creasing.  It’s an improvisational technique where you don’t worry about making folds equally spaced or parallel.  You just approximate, and watch how it distorts the paper.  And since you’re approximating, you can do stuff like making the lines slightly non-parallel.

My style generally involves more careful planning and precreasing, but I like this technique too!  I imagine if you do it enough, you gain some ability to predict how it will turn out.