Articles and Tutorials — grid

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!

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.

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...

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...

The more I fold grids, the more I realize that the possibilities are endless.

For example, I used to think that triangle grids on hexagons could only be centered on grid intersections - that I had to start by folding the hexagon in half in one way or another.