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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