I found this tessellation in my google photos languishing unpublished. It's from the beginning of January. Guess it got lost in the shuffle. I didn't really remember too much about it.  So, I pulled the actual piece from my box of been and done to have a better look.  It's an intermediate level twist fold . It consists of open back hexagons with rhombus twists only two pleats off from the edges. Because of this they partially tuck behind the hexagon. It's kind of an interesting effect.  I must have drawn a diagram before I folded it, but I'm not sure if I can still find it nearly a month later. If I remember, I'll look for it or draw a new one and upload it soon.  Personally, I love creating tessellations like this that nestle the shapes so closely together. They tend to have interesting results. At least, I think so anyway.  Filed under: January 2025 Origami Tessellations . 

 I haven't done a tricky collapse tessellation in a little while. So, this is a new one I created. It begins with rhombuses around an open back hexagon. From there, I add two more rhombuses progressing outward from the center ones. Then it's time to repeat.  In order to fill in the remaining spaces, I used triangle collapses.  I do love a good set of 3 or more triangles tucked into each other. It can be very hard to execute, but it's worth it.  You don't need to stop at three rhombuses. You can keep going. I haven't mapped it, but I would guess that it would require more and more triangles in the gaps. Of course, the more triangles that you try to tuck into each other the more difficult the tessellation becomes. Isn't that the fun of it, though? This is a difficult tessellation , bordering on advanced . I do have a crease pattern. I haven't yet taken a photo of it, but I will try to add it soon.  Filed under: January 2025 Origami Tessellations

Conjoined Stars Flagstone Tessellation  This is a tessellation that I came up with while mucking around with triangle twists around a small hexagon. It's a common starting point for a myriad of tessellations.  In this case, I added some rhombuses and triangles on the edge of the central point. Then I inverted those shapes in order to repeat the pattern. What I wound up creating was a series of of interconnected stars that are all joined together by shared shapes.  It's a pretty cool pattern in my opinion.  I folded it using green tant paper.  It's a difficult tessellation , but once you get used to doing flagstones they become much easier to execute. After a while, they almost become easy. Though they contain a lot of interconnected shapes, they seem to work quite naturally with the triangle grid.  Conjoined Stars by solvingorigamitessellations.com I also find flagstone tessellations much easier to conceive of than other tessellations. They follow a prett...

This is an odd one. It's another bullet shape based tessellation that I created . At the time of conception, I was thoroughly obsessed with creating this particular pattern. So much so, that I completely disregarded the fact that the grid and paper really don't want to make this design.  Nevertheless, I pressed onward.  It has some weird tucks, folds and overlaps. Which make it a difficult tessellation , possibly advanced. It's not the most elegant tessellation I've ever folded. That's for sure. However, in the end, I mostly, made it work.  I was right in the middle of finishing this when it dawned on me that triangles in the same pattern would be just as beautiful and also work much more fluidly with the grid. So, that's a fun tessellation for another day! It works like a typical flagstone in most ways. The small gaps on the back are triangles and the larger ones are rhombuses. But because of the atypical shape of the bullets, the points of the triangles need ...

  This is a refold of a tessellation I created back in April 2021 called ' One Way Streets' .  At that time, I was unfamiliar with the various types of paper available to facilitate better finished tessellations. So I folded it using ordinary 20 lb. printer paper. It worked okay, but not as nicely as I would've liked.  I was also, much more lax in keeping up with saving my diagrams for tessellations that I created . So the original post does not have any sort of crease pattern documentation.  It's not a particularly difficult tessellation to reverse engineer , but it's still nice to have that option.  Anyway, this time around, I used tant paper. Which I love for more intricate tessellations. I also used this design to inaugurate my first use of a wonderful turquoise color of it that I found. It's quite striking.  The design is bullet shapes around large hexagons. In order to repeat the pattern, some small rectangles are needed here and there.  It's a l...

 This is a simpler tessellation than my usual designs. I wouldn't call it easy, but it's not hard either.  Open back hexagons are surrounded by triangle twists. Then I add some long parallelograms More open back hexes and then repeat everything.  It's a nice exercise in how the various shapes work together.   The back view features a really interesting weave pattern.  It's an intermediate level tessellation that fits very nicely on a 32 pleat triangle grid.  It's much less labor-intensive than my usual original origami designs . A relaxing little tessellation that can be completed without too much fuss.  I used 28 lb. white printer paper to execute it. It worked quite well.  Crease pattern is included.  Filed under: January 2025 Origami Tessellations

 This is a tessellation I came up with after having seen and solved one by gatheringfolds. I don't know what she named it because I actually saw it on the instagram of someone else who had folded her design and they didn't specifically reference the title.  When I saw it, I really liked it, but even moreso it made me think of what else I could do with one of the components. In this case, the six rhombus pyramid.  So, after I mapped out her original tessellation , I used that foundation to create this one.  For my design, I repeated the rhombus pyramids by spacing them out from each other. Then I worked out what shape would fill in the rest. It's  just some very large hexagons.  I'll probably fold her original idea since I already have the crease pattern diagrammed. But I chose to fold my idea first.  My diagram follows.  I drew the crease pattern using one of the hexagons as the center. This would work just fine. But ultimately, I decided to u...

 This is a difficult tessellation that contains an interesting array of interconnected shapes.  I conceived of it by mapping rhombuses twisting from three corners of a natural blunt pyramid. From there, I had to work out how to repeat it in a way that naturally flattened.  When you create tessellations like this one that only use a third of the six rotations available on a hexagonal grid, it can be tricky to accurately rotate the shapes. I've found that the easiest way is to have a separate drawing of the main idea that you can rotate. You can use this to easily orient the design so that you don't get frustrated trying to map the full 360 degrees.  Once you have a full six point rotation, you can then work out what might work filling in the remaining spaces.  I discovered that a collapsed hexagon worked for the remainder.  I was so obsessed with the rhombuses and pyramids that I didn't even notice what shapes might be created on the other side.  T...

My first official tessellation post of 2025. This difficult tessellation is a little bit over the top. I kind of tried to see how many triangles I could squeeze together in conjunction with some small hexagonal twists. Every shape is extremely close to the others.  It's not a particularly beautiful tessellation , but I was compelled to do it simply to see if I could get everything to work.  I'm a fan of three triangles tucked into each other and this tessellation is a reflection of that. I would've liked to get all the triangle points tucked more neatly into their partners, but they just kept popping up again every time I tried.  Perhaps if I had utilized a different type of paper I might've been able to do that. But I chose thin paper because it works well with such a dense array of triangle twists. If the paper had been thicker, I'm not sure I'd have been able to flatten everything as well as I did.  The backside is pretty interesting too.  I think that I hav...