Skew Lines Origami Tessellation
Posted by Madonna Yoder on
What are skew lines?
Skew lines are the lonliest pairs of lines - they don't intersect at a single point, and don't maintain a constant distance from each other like parallel lines.
They just pass near each other then continue out to infinity.
It's pretty rare for a tessellation to have pattern elements align this directly when the twists are on opposite sides of the paper - much less have lines in two different directions on the two sides!
How is this possible?
Skew Lines is made up of clusters of four closed square twists, which are then mirrored all over.
Inside the cluster the twists alternate front and back, giving a vertical orientation on one side and a horizontal orientation on the other side.
The striping effect is due to differences in the appearance of closeness of the mirror lines to the edge of the cluster on the two sides - the top and bottom edges of the cluster are mirrored closely on the front while the left and right edges are mirrored closely on the back.
Thus, stripes in different directions on the two sides!
Spot the Repeats
How many clusters can you see here? (Hint: how many stripes are there?)
Which twists belong to the cluster and where are the mirror lines?
When you can analyze a tessellation, the previously-mysterious becomes visible and then doable.
But just because a pattern is visible to you doesn't mean that you have the physical skills to replicate it in another sheet of paper.
And that's where having a training path to follow that teaches the needed skills one by one is really helpful.
The skills needed to fold Skew Lines are as follows:
- Closed square twists
- Mirroring clusters of twists (may include open square twists)
- Folding square tiling tessellations with twists on both sides
- Folding mirrored clusters with twists on both sides
- Densely spacing closed square twists on both sides
These skills can be learned on your own (and you may alread have some of them), but it's much faster and easier to learn from a teacher.
That's why I have tutoring packages available, and I've already figured out which tessellations to teach in what order to take you from pure beginner to folding Skew Lines!