Origami Tessellations

Star Twist Tessellation

This is my first attempt at creating a PDF document, so if things aren’t quite right be understanding and let me know what I should fix.

The crease pattern is relatively straightforward, although it’s a little different than “normal” crease patterns. I think there were too many creases to try and use the old style of dots / dots-and-dashes combination.

I really enjoy this fold, and it looks quite nice when folded from heavier/fancier paper. It’s a good candidate for using/abusing as an ornamental object, too.

When I fold this item I use a square piece of paper, and fold the extra paper behind/inside the back folds. However, for the crease pattern I left that part out as it’s rather secondary to the main folds, unless you’re trying to tessellate it - in which case you can most likely figure that part out for yourself.

I gave the crease pattern a try today, and it folded together rather well- taking significantly less time than my normal method of folding this model. I hope it works out well for you, too. the central twist can be a little tricky to pull together, but it’s really a matter of manipulation and coaxing to make it all fall together. Once it does, it doesn’t like to come apart, even if you want it to.

Ravi Apte makes a good point in asking if I started with star shaped paper here- the crease pattern is certain in a “star” shape, but I’m not really suggesting you use one type of paper over another. I do this with normal square paper, although realistically a hexagon would work best. just draw imaginary lines from all the pointy ends of the star, and you get a hexagon- that’s probably the best shape to work with on this model. I uploaded an image of the original scanned crease pattern here. If you take a look at that, it shows how I normally fold this with square paper.

Happy folding!

Get the Star Twist PDF Document here.

It’s released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license, which allows for non-commercial free distribution and usage. Get the full legal mumbo-jumbo

here - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

or read the PDF which contains further licensing information. Creative Commons licensing allows for lots of great stuff, so check it out!