Rebecca Gieseking

This vase is another piece using the crimp bends I developed a few years ago, exploring incorporating the crimps into cone-like shapes instead of cylinders. Unlike most of my earlier pieces, I also played with painted regions that mimic the curves of the vase form, instead of lines that look like flat planes on the folded form. This is a follow-up to some of the ideas from my square-circle diagonal shift vase.

Another view of this piece:

I’ve played with folding tessellations on and off for quite while, but never had a lot of success combining them into my bowls and vases (my last attempt from 2015 has been lovingly nicknamed the Easter grenade). This bowl is a new and more successful attempt along those lines.

The bowl is folded from a circle of Elephant Hide paper, and the tessellation grid for the diamonds is a modified triangle grid follows that curved edge. The radial lines were fairly straightforward to set up, except that it’s a bit tedious to divide the edge of a circle into 160 equal segments. The other sets of lines are slightly curved so that all the triangles are close enough to equilateral to collapse correctly in the folded model. The grid is only on the outer rim of the paper, which lets the lower part of the bowl curve smoothly. The tessellation itself is fairly simple – basically pairs of rhombus twists that are aligned to look like a row of vertical diamonds.

I recently posted a test model combining a diagonal shift with a vertical plane intersecting it. This model uses that motif in a complete vase, combined with a knit form. I’ve played a bit recently with other knit forms, but this is the first to incorporate color changes.

The knit piece took quite a bit of testing to get the shape worked out. Since it’s easier to adjust size on the origami piece than on the knit piece, I finished the knit piece before I started the origami piece. The dimensions of the two aren’t quite identical, but I’m fairly happy with how similar they came out. I have some ideas in mind for how to clean up those minor differences if I do another similar model.

I’ve been playing recently with variations of diagonal shifts, including twists that join tubes of different shapes. This model incorporates that idea, using a 16-sided tube on the bottom and a square tube on the top. The square portion of the twist inherently has curved edge segments, so I mimicked that shape in the painted lines. This creates an interplay between the curved lines on the flat planes on the top half of the vase, contrasted with the straight-looking lines created by sine waves on the bottom half of the vase.

I recently posted a few test folds of pleated tubes. In this model, I’ve used those pleats in a more finished vase-like form. The curve here reminds me of a question mark, or of a swan’s neck.

The triangular shape means that each pleat requires a lot fewer folds and reference points than my previous curved-neck vases with 10 sides. I’m still exploring whether this is a direction I’m interested in turning into a series.