New Work

This piece builds on my last piece where I made the lacy patterns match up as they crossed over the folded pleats. The diamonds in the last piece were a very regular and mathematical pattern, but this pattern is much more irregular. I arranged the pattern by cutting out circles of 4 different sizes, then tracing them onto the back of the paper wherever they fit. It’s not obvious from the photos, but I made sure the circles are continuous over the seam where the two edges of paper meet. It’s not often I use much (or any) irregularity or randomness in my origami designs, but I’m happy with how this turned out.

Similar to my last lacy vase, I’m continuing the theme of extending a pattern of lace cutouts to fill the whole surface of the vase. This piece has solid diamonds, with lines of lace between them.

The tricky part in this design was that the diamonds cross the fold lines. If I had just drawn diamonds on the flat paper and used those to place the lace, it would be obvious that sections of the lacy lines were missing inside of the pleats, and the design would have looked like a complete mess. I could have calculated exactly where the lines needed to cross, but that seemed like a lot of work. Instead, I measured on the flat paper where I wanted the corners of all the diamonds to be, then folded one pleat at a time so I could trace straight lines on the back over that pleat. That worked surprisingly well and gave a design where the folded pleats almost disappear under the lace. If you look closely, you can see some signs of the approach I used: to make it easy, I made all the diamonds the same height, so the diagonal lines are at different angles for each diamond.

Another lacy vase. In this piece, I shifted away from having only certain sections of the vase be part of the lacy pattern and instead used lacy cutouts on almost half of the paper. That quickly turned into a lot of little shapes to cut out and a lot of hours spent cutting!

At both the top and bottom edges, the lacy and solid stripes are equal in width. On each half of vase, as you move toward the widest part near the center, one set of stripes stays the same width, and the other expands to fill the extra space. The diagonal line dividing the the two sections is reminiscent of my long history of diagonal shift pieces. Similar to my last lacy vase, this one is painted on the outside, and I’ve photographed it on both a black and a white background so it’s easier to see the different layers.

This is a continuation of the lacy series I’ve been working on recently. I’ve been painting the inside of the vase, but as I started getting more ambitious with the cutouts, sometimes the color inside got a bit lost in the design. For this piece, I switched to having the painted color on the outside. That created a challenge in photographing it. In real life, there’s enough cutouts to see the front layer of paper, the white inside layer of paper, and the background behind it. But since I’ve been using white backgrounds for photography, the inside of the vase is hard to distinguish from the background. I took photos on both a white background and a black background to make it easier to see those layers.

On the central section, two opposite panels have fully webbed lace patterns similar to a recent vase, but with regularly-spaced vertical lines. The other two panels have cutouts based on similar webbed lines, but I only cut out every other gap between the lines in a checkerboard-like pattern. It was a little surprising to me how different of a feel those two patterns create, given how similar they are.

Another new piece with lacy cutouts. This piece uses a mix of two cutout shapes: the curved shapes I started using recently, and a belt of squares around the middle. As I’ve gotten more comfortable with cutouts, I’ve reached a point where I’m more okay with having sections of the lace pattern where any one mistake will stand out.

I’ve played a bit with different folding sequences as I’ve developed the series. For all of my painted vases, I always start by painting the paper. When laying out the lace, I’m very careful to make sure the cutouts don’t interfere with the structural folds. For the first few pieces in the series, I scored the paper and cut the lace while it was flat, then pre-creased and folded. In the more recent pieces, I’ve decided it works better to pre-crease the paper before cutting the lace pattern. It’s sometimes tricky to cut the lace accurately when the paper isn’t completely flat, but that reduces the risk of tearing the paper near the lace cutouts while I’m pre-creasing.

One more piece in my lacy series. The lace on this one is a return to the angular shapes of my earlier pieces, but with even more cutouts. As I’ve gotten into the series, I’ve gotten comfortable cutting away more and more of the paper and learned that I can go a lot farther than I expected without the piece collapsing on itself. In this piece, I laid out the lace by drawing straight lines and cut out all the gaps between them. That leaves a lot of gaps where you can see through both layers of lace and all the way through the model. Like most of my recent pieces in the series, this one is painted on the inside, but the color isn’t nearly as visible with so many cutouts.

This piece is a continuation of my series of vases with lacy cutouts. I started playing recently with using curved cutout shapes to form the lacy pattern, and this piece uses a similar type of cutouts. Before we get to the vase, here’s the mostly-finished lace pattern on the pre-creased paper:

The new element in this vase is that the lace flare at the top edge flows over the top edge and curves back down. Since the cut paper is so delicate, it was tricky to get that section to flip over correctly without ripping or folding over.

This piece is my latest exploration of incorporating lace-like cutouts into my vases. The triangle lace pattern is similar the one I’ve used in several of my earlier pieces. I’m continuing the theme of having a brighter color inside the vase that shows through the cutouts.

One of the interesting things in this one is how well the cutouts in the front and back line up at certain angles, making it possible to see all the way through. That creates a neat effect that I wasn’t expecting to be so prominent in this form.

I’ve been working recently on a series of vases where I’ve been exploring cutting lace-like shapes into the vase. This piece is the latest in that series, moving away from only angular shapes of the cutouts. The cutout shapes spiral back and forth around the vase form and emerge as a flare from the top edge.

Similar to one of the other vases, I painted only the inside of the paper. The cutout sections of the paper reveal pops of the brighter color inside. I played a bit with cutting the curves using templates but ended up cutting most of the curves freehand. I was surprised how smoothly that went – and I’m still very surprised that I haven’t run into any major issues in any of these vases with cutting too far and destroying the paper!

I’ve been playing with variations on the diagonal shift quite a bit recently, including folding a shift from a cone instead of a cylinder (and from an inverted cone). This model is the first time I’ve incorporated that into a vase. Continuing with the theme from several of my recent vases, the painted lines are deliberately aligned to look like curved shapes on the finished model, instead of flat planes. I’m hoping to keep exploring in this direction and turn this into a series.