New Work

This summer, I folded a vase from a piece of paper with a lacy cut edge. This piece is a continuation of that theme. The lace pattern here is fairly similar, but it’s based on placing the cut triangles instead of placing the solid lines to cut around. The other big change is that I painted the inside of the paper. I like how that makes the cutouts visible even on the neck of the vase where you can only see through to the pleated layer just underneath the cutout. I’m really happy with how the photographs show the cutouts in the vase’s shadow too.

I’ve folded a few models recently that combine origami with knitting, and this piece is the latest in that series. The vertical curve of the origami piece is constructed using the pleats I explored several months ago. The curved sides of the knit piece are created using short rows, which mimic the pleats in the origami piece. Both pieces are based on triangular tubes, so the sides that face each other are both flat planes.

I’ve always been far from a purist in origami, but the one line I haven’t crossed so far is incorporating cuts (though I have used a few torn edges before). This model changes that. I cut a lacy pattern into the top couple inches of the paper. I started placing the lacy pattern by laying out the folded pleats and avoiding cutting through them, drew pseudo-random straight lines between each set of pleats, and cut out segments between the lines. The pattern was deliberately laid out to make sure the paper kept enough structural integrity to be foldable, and the irregularity makes it easy to disguise minor mistakes.

Here’s a glimpse of what the paper looked like before I folded it:

And a better view of the top edge:

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.

I’ve played before with some mixed media designs, combining origami with ceramics. This piece is a first attempt at combining origami with knitting.

The wavy form is similar to a shape I’ve used in a few previous designs, especially my wavy split bowl. This form is folded from a rectangle, with pleats that release near the top of the form to create the waves.

The knit piece is mostly a simple seed stitch with increases to create the waves, plus a bit of ribbing to create the fold points on the corners. Similar to my ceramics pieces, I made the knit piece first because the dimensions are a bit more challenging to control as precisely. The number of stitches I added in each wave was planned to match the proportions of each pleat in the origami form, which is why the shapes came out so similar.

One of the new challenges of this piece was figuring out how to stiffen the knit form with something that soaked into the yarn and didn’t show on the surface. It turns out that a couple coats of methylcellulose (well know to many origamists for making paper crisp and wet-foldable) works fairly well, along with some wire to hold the shape in place while it dries.

A few more views of the two pieces together:

This piece is a continuation of my series of curved-neck vases. The neck is a series of crimp bends to create the curve. This is from a couple years ago and spent most of a year at the Science Museum Oklahoma, but I didn’t get it posted then.

I like the look of these forms and how much more organic they are than many of my more purely geometric designs. Unfortunately, the series of crimp-folds along the neck is such a pain to fold that I’m not in a hurry to add any more to the series.