This is a origami tessellation that I found on pinterest or flickr. One of those places. At any rate, someone other than me conceived of it. I liked how it looked, so I decided to see if I could reproduce it. Elegant finished appearance, yet super simple to execute. I usually experiment with a small square/grid to figure out unknown tessellations. Wasn't necessary in this case. I didn't even create a crease pattern. The finished design is the crease pattern. It's very straight forward. Once I finished the triangle grid, it was only 30 minutes tops to fold start to finish.  Sometimes the nicest designs are the simplest ones. The reverse side is also a very nice pattern. It's a gorgeous tessellation both backlit and solid. Kudos to whomever first came up with it. It's a brilliant symmetry of form, function and beauty.

This is a tessellation I came up with after folding it as a single module on smaller paper. It was pretty easy to do that way. Doing it repeating across a larger grid proved much more challenging. I like the design, but I'm not happy with the execution. I wasn't really sure how to approach folding it for the best results. I did all my preceasing. Then I did the center as a hex twist on the back. Moved to the front and folded the trapezoids while simultaneously easing the rear triangle twists into place. The center was slow to create, but turned out well. Then tried just using the preceases to get the others to fall in place. The preceases weren't really enough to make it happen. So I changed strategy and unfolded and did each repetition on its own and unfolded and repeated. When each repeat had been prefolded I unfolded again. Redid the center. And again began trying to get the iterations to fall into place using their preconditioning. While I was able to complete the de...

It's time for a new origami tessellation. This time I've folded someone else's design. I found the original image somewhere on flickr and did a reverse engineer on it. It's a beautiful design that's actually quite easy to execute. I have a pic at the bottom of this post of my crease pattern notes that I used to recreate it. It's larger hexes that are manipulated to form negative space stars at their centers. Further proof that some of the simplest designs produce the most stunning results. Basically, you lay out the central star as triangle points off of a small hex. Then you arrange the large hexes in a circle around it. Triangles naturally form in between. You kind of waterbomb the triangles and then fold over the corners of the hexes to create the stars. Rinse and repeat as needed. It's very simple to tessellate as the triangles begin to form additional large hexes radiating out from the center. There's no need to figure out how add...