Crease pattern: Split vase 2
I recently posted the crease pattern for another piece from my Intersections series. Here’s another from the same series.
Etsy shop launch!
I’m excited to announce that I’ve opened an Etsy shop for my origami! I’m happy that I have the opportunity to share my folded models more widely, and I hope they will find homes with people who will enjoy them.
As a start, I have three different ornament designs available in different metallic colors (pictures below). Since my time is fairly limited, quantities are limited (currently 12-15 of each) and I make no guarantees about when more will be available.
Each ornament is folded from a hand-painted rectangle of Elephant Hide paper, and the tag is printed onto Stardream paper to give it a bit of sparkle. The Elephant Hide is a fairly sturdy paper, and the curves create an eggshell-like effect that also strengthens the model. One of the advantages of painting the paper is that I can be sure I’m using lightfast colors that won’t fade over time. I started folding similar ornaments almost 9 years ago, and they’ve held up well over the years even in relatively humid environments (just don’t drop a drop a book on one, or anything like that).
I’m hoping to add more colors in the coming months. If you have any specific requests, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do!
Ornament: More news coming this weekend!
Over the past several months, I’ve been enjoying folding ornaments. I’ve designed ornaments most years and folded a small handful for specific purposes. This year, for the first time, I’ve been folding enough ornaments that I can make them available to other people! More details to come this weekend.
Here’s a preview of one of the designs:
Crease pattern: Double diagonal shift vase
This design from 2013 is one of my early pieces from the diagonal shift series. The crease pattern is below:
I folded a variation in 2014 with the same crease pattern. The only difference between these two pieces is the painted pattern.
Test fold: Out-turned cone-based diagonal shift
I recently posted a test model of a cone-based diagonal shift where the cone pointed inward toward the shift. This model is the reverse of that, where the cone instead points outward toward the shift.
The math of this variation is very similar to the inturned cone. For both variations, if the cone angle and the plane angle are the same, the convergence point is exactly the same distance from the top edge of the ellipse. But, when the paper comes back to being a cylinder, the effective distance of the horizontal shift is very different. When the cone is inturned, the top edge of the ellipse is shifted toward the center of the base cylinder, so the shift looks small. Here, since the cone is out-turned, the top edge of the ellipse instead sticks out quite a ways past the edge of the narrow base cylinder, so the amount of total shift horizontally looks much larger.
New work: Vase with a triangle lace edge
I’ve always been far from a purist in origami, but the one line I haven’t crossed so far is incorporating cuts (though I have used a few torn edges before). This model changes that. I cut a lacy pattern into the top couple inches of the paper. I started placing the lacy pattern by laying out the folded pleats and avoiding cutting through them, drew pseudo-random straight lines between each set of pleats, and cut out segments between the lines. The pattern was deliberately laid out to make sure the paper kept enough structural integrity to be foldable, and the irregularity makes it easy to disguise minor mistakes.
Here’s a glimpse of what the paper looked like before I folded it:
And a better view of the top edge:
Updates to email list
Hopefully this will be the last admin post for a while so I can get back to focusing on origami updates!
Since Google is deprecating Feedburner for email subscriptions, I’m transitioning my email list to MailChimp. To this point, 100% of emails to my subscribers have been updates that I posted something new on my blog. Going forward, I may on rare occasions send things to that email list that aren’t just blog posts, but I don’t expect that to change too much.
If you subscribed to my email list in the past month: You are already subscribed via MailChimp, and shouldn’t notice any changes.
If you subscribed to my email list more than a month ago: I imported your email address from Feedburner to MailChimp. For this post, you should receive two emails, one from each list. These emails may show up an hour or two apart, since each list auto-sends all posts from the day on its own schedule. For future posts, you should only receive an email from MailChimp. If you do not receive an email from MailChimp, check your spam folder, or re-subscribe to the MailChimp list.
If you are not subscribed to my email list: If you would like to subscribe, you can subscribe here. Like most email lists, look for an initial email in your inbox asking you to confirm that you want to receive these emails.
If anything on my email list seems to be behaving incorrectly: Please let me know so I can deal with it!
Pieces in Museo del Origami permanent collection
I’m pleased to announce that my series of three curved-neck vases is now part of the permanent collection of the Museo del Origami in Colonia, Uruguay! The museum has a few more details on the addition on its news page.
The Museo del Origami opened in 2020 and is the only museum in the Americas that focuses exclusively on origami. Their permanent collection traces the historical development of origami in both the East and the West, highlights the work of contemporary origami artists across many design styles, and explores applications of origami in science, technology, education, and design.
Ten years of origami designs
I realized recently that it’s been just over ten years since I started designing origami vases and bowls! That’s a good opportunity to show off a few highlights of how my artwork has grown and changed over that time.
The pre-design days
Even though I’ve only been designing for ten years, I’ve enjoyed doing origami since preschool. In college, I got really into modular origami, and quite a few of my friends ended up with gifts of various models. As a double-major in art and chemistry, origami-related themes were a recurring theme in my artwork. My senior art show in 2009 at Furman University was a series of 24″ x 24″ oil paintings of paper cranes.
The first designs
After I started grad school in chemistry, I no longer had the large blocks of times I needed for painting, but I still have a drive to create. In spring 2011, I went to a lecture by Robert Lang where he talked about the math and engineering in origami, which inspired me to get back into origami. I had a very brief foray into folding representational models, but quickly figured out I wasn’t actually all that interested folding those. While looking for crease patterns online, I stumbled upon Philip Chapman-Bell’s Flickr page, where he had several crease patterns of curved-crease vases. I folded a few of his crease patterns and realized the math behind them couldn’t be all that complicated. My first design was a little underwhelming, but it was enough to get me hooked.
Curves and organic shapes (2011-present)
It only took me a few months to get bored with only folding designs based on symmetric curved-crease pleats and start exploring ways of distorting the symmetry. One of my earlier explorations was spirals, which worked out best in the piece I’ve used as a profile picture in quite a few places in 2012.
I’ve never done an extensive series of more organic forms, but I’ve had quite a few brief forays into designs that are based more on curves. The curved-neck vases are one of my favorite examples of that. The design elements used to create the curved necks are the same ones I’ve used in a number of more geometric-looking vases, but applied in a slightly different way.
Intersections series (2012-2014)
The first major series I did was based on taking curved-crease pleated vase/bowl forms and intersecting them with vertical planes. There were two main things that attracted me to creating these types of designs. The first was the engineering challenge: figuring out how to combine the curved forms with flat planes. The second, more aesthetic goal was also a big piece: combining geometric elements that represent my scientific interests with more organic elements that represent my artistic interests.
Diagonal shifts (2013-2014)
The series that started getting me a good bit of attention in the origami world was my diagonal shift series, where the curved form is cut by a diagonal plane and shifted. I love how the diagonal shift element leads to shapes that look like they should be impossible to create from a single uncut sheet of paper, even though the shift along the diagonal comes very naturally from the construction of the twist. I also like how these pieces initially draw people in based on their aesthetic qualities, but once I have them drawn in, even people from outside of origami switch over to trying to figure out how they work. I have the privilege of using art to bring out people’s scientific/engineering thought processes! I realized after I started this series that part of the inspiration probably came from my visit to the Magritte museum in Brussels and spending a day there looking at his Surrealist artwork.
More exploration of distorted vases (2016-present)
A couple years after the original diagonal shift series, I started extending the geometric distortions to more complicated versions. These pieces are very modular, based on stacking different twist and bend motifs in various ways. I’m still working on developing more motifs that let me distort the vase-like forms in new ways, and on combining them to create interesting forms.
Mixed media (ceramics 2015-2016, knit 2020-present)
One other interest I’ve had is combining other media with origami. My first foray into that was with ceramics. Since working on the pottery wheel naturally tends to produce shapes that are similar to the pleated vase forms, it seemed like a good fit. I enjoyed finding ways of getting the clay and the paper forms to mimic each other.
More recently, I’ve done several pieces combining knit forms with origami. It’s taken a decent bit of work to figure out how to construct shapes similar to my origami forms in yarn, and that’s something I’m definitely still figuring out. Stiffening the yarn is a very slow process that I haven’t figured out how to speed up, so I’m still deciding whether this is a direction I’ll take much further.
Crease pattern: Four-part intersections bowl
The four-part intersections bowl is a model I designed in 2014, and I posted some photos in progress when I was folding it. I drew the crease pattern before my solo show at Furman University and displayed actual-size printouts of the crease pattern on the walls there, but somehow it never made my blog. So now it’s time to rectify that!
The crease patterns for all four pieces are below, from the tallest piece to the shortest one. Click any of the images to get a higher-resolution version.
