Advent of Tess 2023
Posted by Madonna Yoder on
Advent of Tess has become a beloved holiday tradition, with a new mini tessellation pattern tutorial released every day from December 1st through Christmas Day.
This year’s patterns were completely new, with no overlap with Advent of Tess 2022, and introduced trapezoid twists too!
These patterns are designed to start out very accessible to any folder, and progressively introduce new twists and ideas until you arrive at advanced skills like open rhombus twists, overlapping twists, trapezoid twists, and flagstone techniques.
The challenge is free to join, with paper packs (full pack and just paper) and an ebook of crease patterns of the 25 challenge pieces plus 31 alternate endings available if you’d like to use my favorite paper and/or fold more repeats of each pattern.
There was a lot more focus this year on the alternate endings possible after a given mini tessellation start, with short videos on these alternate endings accompanying every day’s tutorial.
When you sign up for Advent of Tess today, you’ll have access to all the tutorials immediately and also get daily reminders for each of the 25 days of the challenge.
As I like to remind people, tessellations are infinite and last forever, and so does Advent of Tess - you can sign up at any time and take however long you like to finish and there’s no such thing as “too late”.
You’ll be joining hundreds of origami folders around the world in trying out or revisiting tessellation techniques and expanding the possibilities that you can see in a single sheet of paper.
All the grids used in Advent of Tess are exactly the same - 16 divisions on a hexagon, parallel to the edges of the paper - and I walk you through how to cut out a hexagon and fold that grid in the welcome video of the challenge.
My aim with Advent of Tess is to make tessellation folding fun instead of frustrating, exciting instead of boring, and to spark ideas about different ways to use twists in as many folders as possible.
So, will you join me in folding some mini tessellations?
The tutorials are ready and waiting for you!