Test fold: Tube with a diagonal shift

This concept is an extension of the ideas I worked on this winter and early spring, particularly my Intersections series and my last test fold. Like those earlier pieces, I’m combining a curved form with a flat plane. The difference here is that instead of the flat plane being perfectly vertical, here the flat plane is along a diagonal. This requires a very different folding strategy.

I have several ideas of where I’d like to go with this folding strategy, but for now I’m still working out the engineering for it. This test piece was folded from a fairly simple-looking crease pattern, but actually folding it was surprisingly difficult. Even using Elephant Hide paper, which is a very tough paper, some of the internal layers started to tear. I want to try various tweaks to the proportions to see if I can find a version that collapses more easily. Also, in my current version the flat plane is essentially a circle, but it should be elongated into an ellipse. If I can find a way to cleanly fold an ellipse, that may remove some of the distortions to the tube.