At some point, I discovered the area of pleat tessellations, a technique popularized by origamist Goran Konjevod.  There are a bunch of things you can do with this technique, but I thought I’d show the simplest example I have.  This is something that you can fold at home, and experiment with your own variations.

To make this model, we start by folding the paper into 16 divisions both horizontally and vertically.  This is a common first step in many origami tessellations, so forgive me for just throwing it out there like it’s nothing.  For once, I’ll go into more depth about how to do that.

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When I folded this model back in 2016, I was challenging myself to fold it without explicit instructions.

Traditionally, people fold origami by following folding diagrams, which list out the steps in sequential order.  However, at more advanced levels, you can fold origami with nothing but a crease pattern, also called a CP.  A CP shows where all the essential creases will lie, if the paper were fully unfolded.  CPs provide information in a much more condensed format, and are far easier to create than folding diagrams, so it tends to be a lot easier to find CPs than full folding diagrams.

Below the fold I have a few tips for origamists interested in folding from CPs.

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Some readers are interested in origami that they can actually make themselves.  The trouble with that is that many of the designs are quite complicated, or it’s difficult to get instructions that can be shared.  For original designs, it can take hours to draw diagrams even for relatively simple designs–and most of them are not very simple at all.  Other designs I get from books, and the diagrams are under copyright!  And for many designs, the only available instructions are the crease patterns.

Today I present a design that I happen to have diagrams for.  This closed square origami box is not my design, but I couldn’t find diagrams so I drew up some myself.  Someone also made a video.  Diagrams below the cut.

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Back when I was going to origami meetups, somebody showed me a design which they called the Cootie Catcher Deluxe.  It’s a variation on the cootie catcher, aka the fortune teller.  There’s some additional ornamentation where your fingers would go–which makes it non-functional as a fortune teller–but I’m not complaining.  Anyway, they couldn’t remember how they made it, and I couldn’t find any mention of it on the internet.  So here we have a legit reverse-engineering problem.  Those are fun.

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Some time ago, someone showed me Jun Maekawa’s Fractal Pyramid, and I thought, I could make that modular.  So I designed custom units–actually, several distinct custom units.  This is definitely over-designed, and not fit for sharing instructions, but it can be fun to make a one-of-a-kind model.

How many units would you guess are in this model?  Highlight to see answer: It’s 29.

Some years ago I went to an origami convention, and I thought I’d bring something big and flashy.  So I found this design by Daniel Kwan, decided an appropriate coloring, and the size of the final model surprised me.

No I don’t really know what the “14th Stellation of the Icosahedron is”, I just take Daniel Kwan’s word for it that that’s what it is.  I do know that to “stellate” a polyhedron means to extend the planes of each face outwards, beyond their usual shapes.  Wikipedia has a list of 59 ways to stellate an icosahedron, and this one seems to be arbitrarily designated the 14th stellation.

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Today’s model is a tessellation that someone from the local origami meetup showed me how to make.  Sigh, remember meetups?  (Actually the issue is I moved and it’s far away.)  Anyway, this guy said he had been making tessellations for decades (?), before any of the origami tessellation books came out.  He had perfected a particular tessellation base, which is used in the model above.  He had a way of folding it with minimal precreasing.

I feel like I explain these terms over and over, but I don’t want people to feel overly confused by what I’m talking about.  Precreasing is when you make creases in the paper before collapsing it into the shape you want.  The normal method for making origami tessellations involves lots of precreasing, making a grid of squares or triangles.  I have a photo example below.

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