Rebecca Gieseking

Inspired by my diagonal shift pieces, this model is a test piece incorporating several diagonal planes. The base, central plane, and top edge are all defined by sine waves. Unlike my previous models, these sine waves create three planes parallel to the table but tilt the central axis of the bowl. This is fairly straightforward to do with all straight folds, and I’m exploring whether this concept can be used with curved folds in my more complex diagonal shift designs.

As usual, I designed an ornament this year, similar to my designs the past several years. The paper is hand-painted with several layers of watered-down acrylic paint, which gives a texture a lot like watercolors. It doesn’t show much in the photo, but there’s a thin layer of silver paint on top that gives it a hint of sparkle.

This vase builds on my recent exploration of twists in non-cylindrical tubes. The central twist in this model is a 16-sided twist in a square tube. Like in my previous test fold, the twist naturally creates segments of parabolas on each face of the square tube. I repeated the parabolic shape several times to create the wavy painted pattern with a color gradient.

I bought this marbled paper several months ago because the colors and shapes within the marbling reminded me of a peacock. This vase has a fairly simple shape, also inspired by a peacock. This is a softer paper than I’m used to folding, even after being treated with methylcellulose, but it works for forms of this level of complexity.

This piece builds on my helix from several months ago. The neck of the vase uses a series of crimp-bends at different angles. The crimp-bends are pretty labor-intensive to fold, but it creates an interesting effect. Here’s a second view to show the curvature of the neck more clearly:

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been experimenting with papers. Methylcellulose is commonly used in complex origami to size paper, making soft papers stiffer and easier to wet-fold, or to back-coat two sheets of paper and adhere them together.

Since the Elephant Hide paper I usually use doesn’t need to be sized, I didn’t try out methylcellulose until very recently. Since my designs need fairly stiff, thick papers, even adding methylcellulose isn’t enough to make some papers usable. But, if the pretty paper is thin enough, I can use methylcellulose to adhere it to Elephant Hide, and the double-layer paper folds essentially like a sheet of Elephant Hide.

This model is folded from a fairly thin sheet of marbled paper adhered to Elephant Hide. The marbled paper has a bit of texture, so it didn’t stick to the Elephant Hide quite as well as I had hoped, but I was still able to fold it into a relatively simple vase form.