This tess features linearly repeating teardrop and diamond shapes. Negative space triangles and diamonds result in the in between areas. Basically, I was just going for a consistent repeating pattern of those teardrop shapes. This uses a standard triangle grid. The points on the teardrops are created using rabbit ear sink folds. Rabbit ear sink folds are probably my least favorite of all the typical tessellation folding techniques. But we do what we must for our art. I only employed a 32 pleat gird. This would look really fantastic on a bigger grid.

This is in keeping with my exploration of non-hexagonal twists repeating. It's just a dizzying array of rhombuses all linked to one another. It employs an up/down repetition pattern. The rhombus shapes are different from traditional rhombus twists as they follow the natural grid lines. This crease pattern is a natural flow of the same single shape ad infinitum. It takes advantage of the natural folds of a triangle grid to create an easy to fold collapse that results in a complex structure of repetitions. It's difficult and a little confusing trying to get all the collapses to flow in the same direction. Especailly at the edges where the shapes get truncated. You could potentially alternate directions as well. Or come up with other patterns. The folds go forward or back at your discretion. I often find it frustrating to see a folded tessellation and no crease pattern to accompany it. Depending on how the photo was taken, the lighting and the clarity, it can so

This is a crazy crease pattern I mapped out on some small paper. It really is controlled chaos. The idea was to create repetitions of those half hexagon (trapezoid) shapes. Although I finished the pattern, I haven't actually folded it yet. When I started I didn't really know how it would evolve. I wound up with a lot of parallelograms in the form of double isosceles  equilateral triangles. The repeating trapezoids get larger as they radiate out from the center. This was something I should have, but didn't expect. The whole concept of these kinds of twists has really opened up a lot of possibilities in my mind.

I like this and don't like it at the same time. On the one hand it's a really perfect tessellation. Everything flows together as it should. On the other hand, it's a fussy fold that doesn't always work out neatly across the entirety of the the paper. It's a very straightforward concept. A small hexagon is collapsed to the next larger. The petal shapes radiate out from there. Since the shapes don't flow seamlessly into one another, there are some blunted pyramid shapes to connect them all. In my imagination this looked much more beautiful than it turned out in real life. Perhaps I was too ambitious and there should've been greater negative space between the iterations. I still love the concept. The mechanics of it are wonderful. I just wish it yielded a more pleasing visual result. What do you think?

I stumbled into this tessellation by accident. I was just playing around with the rectangle twists you can get from a triangle grid. Quite unexpectedly I realized how the offsets of a single twist could gracefully flow into the next. After that the pattern emerged quite readily. It's an easy fold to execute. The results are pretty nice though. I struggled with how to arrange the pattern. The folds that create the squares can all go in either an up or down pattern. A diligent folder could probably alternate then from front to back. I just went with continuous rows of front folds. Basic crease pattern is shown.

This is an interesting one.You've got some open back hexagon twists.  Then there are some trapezoids around them. Those have some triangle twists on the back helping them to work together. We have large open back triangle twists on the rear to connect the repetitions of each 'star'. Then some small triangle twists were needed on the front to flatten the design. I hadn't planned for the small triangles on the front, but they became necessary as the deisgn began to fall into place. The second photo, which is the rear, shows the large rear triangles more clearly. This particular tessellation would be much better served by a somewhat larger grid with more pleats, but you get the gist. It would also look cooler if the sun would ever shine and give some decent backlighting. I have literally been waiting days for a bright, sunny day to take a better pic, but it doesn't want to happen. Even with minimal light, it's pretty nifty.

I saw this polygon shape used in some other tesses on flickr and thought I'd see how it would work out for me. When I create tessellations they tend to be vry compact and overlapping. This one is no exception. Basically the shape just surrounds open back hexagons. It took a little bit of finessing some triangle twists to work everything out to fall into place cohesively. When I started, I imagined it differently, but this is where the paper took me. I never argue with the paper. It always wins.