Articles and Tutorials — beginner

Tessellation Garden - a Living Library of Origami Tessellation Designs

Posted by Madonna Yoder on

Tessellation Garden - a Living Library of Origami Tessellation Designs
Tessellation Garden is a collection of all of my origami tessellation designs, arranged in a portal with sorting by tiling and sorting by twist difficulty and structural complexity.

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How to Fold from a Crease Pattern

Posted by Madonna Yoder on

How to Fold from a Crease Pattern

To start folding from crease patterns, we must first decide what part of the pattern to fold - what to put in the center, and how many repeats we want.

Next, we need to actually fold the grid.

Finally, we can start folding!

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How to Fold Your First Tessellation

Posted by Madonna Yoder on

How to Fold Your First Tessellation

Managing many pleats at once is one of the harder things about tessellations, but using these three-way intersections one at a time lets us minimize the difficulty and focus on the steps.

These three-way intersections can be put together in a huge variety of ways, from rotational to mirrored to combinations of both.

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How to Start with Tessellations

Posted by Madonna Yoder on

How to Start with Tessellations

Many folders would like to start learning tessellations, but aren't sure where to start. In this video I introduced the four major grid types that every tessellation folder needs to know and clarified the distinction between twist-based tessellations, corrugations, and tessellations that require an all-at-once collapse. You see, there are easier and harder ways to fold tessellations and when many folders see a crease pattern for the first time they think that they need to precrease everything and then collapse all at once. That's actually the hardest way to learn tessellations - you have more work at the beginning, more...

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How to Play with Twist Blocks

Posted by Madonna Yoder on

How to Play with Twist Blocks

What are twist blocks?   Whenever I look at tessellation crease patterns, I mentally  break them up into their component parts. With twist-based tessellations, those parts are twists and they're connected by pleats. The good news is that the same set of twists are used over and over again in different tessellations, which means that we can treat them like building blocks and drag and drop to snap them together! I made a set of digital twist blocks in both square and triangle grid for my Tessellations by Tiles students last fall and found that they really speed up the diagramming...

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Origami Tessellation Terms and Definitions

Posted by Madonna Yoder on

Origami Tessellation Terms and Definitions

While you may already be familiar with origami terms like mountain and valley folds, sinks, squashes, swivels, and rabbit ears, tessellations have a vocabulary of their own. Unfortunately, the vocabulary of tessellations is not standardized across all tessellation designers and each tessellation book uses different definitions - and different colors and symbols for their diagrams. This can make it hard to learn, since everyone is saying things in different ways. I try to stick to consistent definitions throughout my teaching, and to explain my terms in plain English - no math speak. Here's my list of the most important terms to...

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