Advent of Tess 2026: Fifth Year of Folding Fun

Advent of Tessellations is back for a fifth 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 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 on the welcome page when you sign up.

I’d recommend using a hexagon measuring 5 inches (13 cm) per edge and 10 inches (25 cm) from point to point for folders who are less experienced with tessellations and a hexagon as small as 3 inches (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 Gathering Folds and in plain hexagons at Origami-Shop.

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 squashed at a time.

This year the focus is on overlapping twists (Days 6-7, 18, 20, 23-24), flagstone spacing (Days 10, 14-20, 22, 25), and hybrid hexagon twists (Days 21-25), 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.

These designs get quite complicated by the end, so newer tessellation folders may first want to check out Tessellation Foundations (free) for gridding and twist support.

You can also work through prior years of Advent of Tess starting with Day 1 of each series, then Day 2 of each series and so on to get a more gradual introduction to folding origami tessellations and prepare for the start of Advent of Tess 2026 on December 1.

One of the most stunning patterns in Advent of Tess this year is Incendiary, on Day 20.

Even with overlapping twists on the front and flagstone spacing on the back, I’ll be teaching how to fold this pattern one twist at a time.

Marigold shows an alternative way to repeat the Incendiary unit, and both patterns are included in the ebook.

Incendiary unit, Incendiary with repeats, Marigold with repeats

You don’t need to wait until the end of Advent of Tess 2026 to reach interesting patterns, either.

These three tessellations are alternate endings to patterns taught in the first week of the challenge!

Bridged Fields, Sprouts, Fission

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!