I recently returned from a long plane trip, and I had a lot of time for origami while in transit. Since my typical folding style isn’t very conducive to folding while traveling, I decided to practice folding tessellations from Eric Gjerde’s book, Origami Tessellations: Awe-Inspiring Geometric Design. It’s a nice introduction, building up from the basic folding techniques to a variety of simple and complex tessellations.
I have folded a couple tessellations before, but this was my first time folding a lot in a short period of time. I learned the proper way to fold grids to minimize errors, but folding the grids still takes a long time (for 32 divisions, close to an hour for a square grid and longer for a hexagonal grid). These tessellations are all folded from cheap 6-inch squares of paper, which isn’t ideal. The paper gets soft too quickly, which limits the complexity of the models I could successfully fold. I would like to eventually incorporate more tessellated/corrugated elements into some of my own 3D designs, but it may still be a while before I build up the skills to do that well.
