treated unryu paper Originally uploaded by Ori-gomi. So I had a hard time finding out what sort of Methyl Cellulose I should use on thin paper like unryu (like washi, made with mulberry or something similar). MC makes it stiff- you get it as a powder and mix it up, apply it, let it dry, etc. I got a great tip from someone on the Origami-L mailing list to use Sodium Carboxymethyl Cellulose, which apparently dries stiffer than regular methyl cellulose. I’m not a chemist (that’s my wife!) so I really wouldn’t know, but I checked out the place he recommended. it was $26.95 for a 100g bottle, which would have lasted quite a while but seemed expensive to the cheap old man inside me. So having put this off for a while (and I picked up a large supply of great papers that need it!) I happened across something this weekend that seems to solve my problem. at my parent’s house, working down in my dad’s woodshop, I noticed a can of “spray starch” …

growabrain: Death in the snow got a nice mention on this blog, full of some rather odd links (which now, of course, includes me in that category!)

Popcorn Twist Tessellation Originally uploaded by infinite-origami. new-to-flickr origami tessellation folder infinite-origami is working on an interesting new tessellation he’s calling a “popcorn twist”. it looks somewhat like the owesen puffy star thing, but is more like a tower with what looks to be a solid locking mechanism on the bottom giving it more structural integrity. should be interesting to see how this folds out for him! pop over and take a look.

unnamed design in process, WIP, backlit Originally uploaded by Ori-gomi. Fooling around with some of the same folding concepts behind the star twist v2.1. interestingly enough, doing the same process with a triangle base yields odd hexagonal shapes as one grows increasingly larger. However, so far they are overly clumsy, and multiple attempts have not found a more desirable folding method. too much extra paper on the reverse so far. time to unfold and try a different attack. Folded the original design out of unryu, which was much more compliant for such a layered concept- this sheet of standard kami is giving up the ghost. look for a future photoset detailing a simple method of producing wonderful tessellation paper, soon!

Slowly working on porting www.origamitessellations.com to WordPress, and integrating blog content. This means that origomi.blogspot.com will be deprecated, and the old main page from origamitessellations.com will go away. The downside of all this is that I’m losing the ability to maintain the Portuguese content of my page; this is a bummer. but I can’t find any good multilingual plugins that seem to “just work”. I’ll still do my best to keep it in both, but we’ll have to see how that all works out in the long run.