New work: Crimped vase

Crimped vase

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:

Crimped vase
Crimped vase

New work: Crimped vase Read More »

A new website look!

I’ve been working on updating the look of my website, and I’m proud to show off the new look! This is the first major round of updates I’ve done since I first launched the site in late 2012. This was a good chance to replace some of my old theming based on my 2012 origami designs with a new logo inspired by the designs I’m better known for. I’m also very happy with the new look of the Artwork page, showing off many of the series I’ve worked on.

One thing I discovered while doing the updates is that a good number of the crease patterns I’ve drawn for shows or classes never made it online. Keep an eye out for those to be added to the Crease Patterns and Tutorials page in the coming weeks and months!

I’m still working on some more minor updates, but those shouldn’t change the overall look or navigation.

(And if anything looks weird or broken, please let me know – I’ve gone through several times to try to catch things, but I very well may have missed something)

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Test fold: Cone-based diagonal shift

One more diagonal shift variation, with a different form of playing with the shape of the connecting tube of paper. Here, the shift is based on a cone of paper instead of a smooth cylinder.

Cone-based diagonal shift

Like my usual cylinder-based diagonal shifts, this model has a flat plane of paper connecting the top and bottom halves of the model, and that flat plane is essentially an ellipse. Because the cone shifts the convergence point much closer to the center of each cylinder, the two halves don’t have nearly as much of a horizontal shift between them.

A second photo, showing an example with just one half of the diagonal shift, showing the internal construction more clearly:

Half of a cone-based diagonal shift

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New work: Diamond-edged bowl

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.

Diamond-edged vase

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.

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Upcoming talk at OrigamiUSA’s FoldFest

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be giving a talk about my origami at OrigamiUSA’s FoldFest Spring 2021! The event runs from Saturday, April 10, 10:00am EDT until Sunday, April 11, 11:00am EDT. My talk, titled “Twists and Bends,” will be at 6:00pm EDT on April 10 (details on the full schedule).

I’ll be talking about the design principles behind quite a few of my geometrically distorted vases, starting from a simple accordion fold and building all the way up to the impossible-looking diagonal shifts and bends. I’ll show a bunch of the motifs that show up in the crease patterns and how they combine in the finished models.

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New work: Origami/knit diagonal intersections vase

Origami/knit diagonal intersections vase

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.

Origami/knit diagonal intersections vase

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.

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New work: Square-circle diagonal shift vase

Square-circle diagonal shift vase

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.

Square-circle diagonal shift vase

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Test fold: Diagonal intersections

Diagonal intersections

This test fold is a minor re-work of one from 2014 that combines ideas from my Diagonal Shift series with the flat vertical planes of my earlier Intersections work.

At the time, this was an idea I was interested in developing further, but the motif was annoying enough to fold that I didn’t do anything with it at the time. With several years more experience folding similar models and some very minor re-engineering of the internal structure, I got this to a point where I can use it in more complex models.

A few more views:

Diagonal intersections
Diagonal intersections

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New work: Pleated curved-necked 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.

Pleated curved-necked vase

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.

Pleated curved-necked vase

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