Advent of Tess 2025: 25 Days of Tessellation Tutorials
Posted by Madonna Yoder on
Advent of Tessellations is back for a fourth year of daily folding fun!
The tutorials will be released daily from December 1-25 on the Gathering Folds website and YouTube channel and all of the patterns are new, with no duplicates from previous years.
You can sign up for free to get daily email reminders and PDFs of crease patterns for each day’s project as the tutorials come out, plus you’ll get the option when you sign up to access all the tutorials (from all years) as a course with lessons that you can mark complete as you go.
All of the patterns this year use 24 grid divisions on a hexagonal sheet of paper and you’ll find a link to a tutorial for this grid in the welcome email when you sign up.
I’d recommend using a hexagon measuring 5 in/13 cm per edge (10 in/25 cm from point to point) for folders who are less experienced with tessellations and a hexagon as small as 3 in/7.5 cm per edge for experienced folders.
The best paper to use for these mini tessellations is Skytone, which is available in a variety of formats (including pre-cut 5-inch hexagons with a variety of crease pattern and grid options) at gatheringfolds.com and occasionally available as rectangles through Origami-Shop (based in France, affiliate link) too.
You’ll be joining thousands of folders around the world in trying a new tessellation pattern each day and since the patterns are in a sequence that builds skills as you go, you don’t need much tessellation folding experience to get started.
All of the patterns are folded directly on the grid, without additional precreasing, and only one twist is added at a time.
This year the focus is on isoarea patterns (Days 4, 9-12, 17-20), trapezoid twists (Days 13-25), and flagstone spacing (Days 10-15, 17-22, 24-25) and you can find multiple ways to repeat each mini pattern in this year’s ebook of extended patterns, which has 64 different tessellations based on the 25 mini patterns in Advent of Tess.
This is a pretty advanced set of patterns, so newer tessellation folders may want to check out Tessellation Foundations (free) for gridding and twist support and prior years of Advent of Tess first.
These three patterns are Citrus Slices (Day 7), Fruitcake, and Jello Salad, and they all use the same choices for the first three twists but repeat in different ways.
These next three patterns are Serrated (Day 24), Daffodils, and Crocuses, which shows that even flagstone motifs can repeat in new ways.
There are always multiple ways to repeat portions of an origami tessellation, which means that we’ll never run out of new patterns to fold!
Advent of Tess gives a guided tour of a new set of tessellation patterns each year and it’s designed to help you see tessellations in a new way, whether you’ve just started folding or have been folding tessellations for years.
Will you join the party this December and fold these infinite patterns for yourself?
See you there!