Wheels and Spokes Origami Tessellation

This is an unusual tessellation that I recently designed. It's a dense collapse of various shapes that is based off a an open back hexagon with small right triangles around its edges. From there it just gets even weirder. I collapse some teardrop shapes around the center and add triangle twists. In order to repeat the pattern I used some oblong rectangle type shapes. It's all very unorthodox, but it does work. 

It was an interesting exercise in how tightly shapes can be manipulated. 

I would label it as a difficult tessellation to fold. It's full of strange shapes and troublesome overlaps. 

I used thin paper because I knew that everything was very close together and I figured that would make it more feasible to execute the many overlaps. Which it did. However, it also made it hard to keep the smaller shapes as neat as I would've liked. 

Would this work better with thicker paper? Maybe. Probably. 

You can see my center is slightly askew because one of the small right triangles didn't quite land correctly. 

The reverse side kind of resembles a really odd flagstone. 

My crease pattern is included below. However, I drew it with slightly smaller oblong rectangles than I used to actually fold it. Works either way. The white out area is just to erase a shape from an unrelated fold. 

Filed under: April 2025 Origami Tessellations