Over the past month, I have been test-folding lots of corrugation patterns in preparation for a new series. Most of these are not original designs; they are folded from crease patterns, reverse-engineered, or experiments vaguely based on images from the Flickr Origami Corrugations group. These are all folded from very cheap origami paper, not anything at all suitable for complex designs. I have previously folded a couple designs incorporating both pleated and corrugated segments, but only with very simple corrugated patterns. I am hoping that with more practice, I will be able to incorporate more complex corrugations and tessellations into my vases.

Here are a couple closer-up images of some of the corrugations:

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.

 

This test model is a combination of my two recent series: Diagonal Shifts and Intersections. Even though this piece worked decently as a test model, it doesn’t work quite well enough yet for me to use this in a real model. Hopefully if I do another test fold, I’ll be able to fix some of those problems.

I’ve done a lot of engineering to figure out how to fold my recent series, but I haven’t shown much of the process. This time I took some photos of my first couple test folds to share. I started with some of the measurements I’ve previously used for the diagonal shift models. Creating the flat plane of the model is basically just folding down a rhombus to a single line. My first attempt was to fold the central rhombus into a waterbomb base:

This design looks great from the front, but the back won’t work for the full model. The large triangle sticking up in the back will get in the way of the curved portion of the model. A good start, but not quite useable.

Then I started trying to figure out how to get rid of that extra triangle. I started by inverting the waterbomb base so the triangle was sticking out the front of the model instead of out the back. Then I squash-folded the triangle to flatten it against the front of the model:

This design is much better from the back – there’s no extra paper between the two flaps along the central diagonal. That means I should be able to use it for more complex models. The problem is that the front is very messy-looking: the extra paper from the central rhombus is visible and not especially nice to see there.

In my third test fold, I combined the best parts of my two first test folds. I squash-folded the central rhombus, but I also hid the extra paper on the back side of the model:

This final design is what I used in the full test model (photo at the beginning of this post). I combined it with the diagonal shift approach I’ve already written about. Combining the flat part and the curved part is still a challenge, but it’s one I’m working on. I’m hoping to fold at least one or two full models based on this design, but it may be too complicated to turn into a full series.