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Pentagonal stars with negative space

Continuing with the ideas of using negative space to form shapes, I tried to fold a traditional 5-pointed star. This required figuring out a few things, and to make life significantly easier for me I created a pretty simple crease pattern to use. However, a lot of the fold relationships with pentagons aren’t as easy to work out, and things don’t fold out to be easy distances like 1:2; with pentagons, they are primarily 1:1.6…, or 1/phi. I love the number Phi, and it’s really a fantastic thing, but folding it isn’t as easy! I’m sharing this example just to show it’s certainly possible, and hopefully to spur some other people on to see what they can do with the same sorts of ideas.

Here’s some photos of what I was working on; the backlit image has one corner which is folded differently, to illustrate the same kind of concept I used on my 6 sided stars. figuring out where to put all the creases was pretty tricky, although if I was doing it again it would be simpler. It’s definitely all about reference creases and lines.

Pentagonal stars with negative space

Pentagonal stars with negative space

Pentagonal stars with negative space

And here’s the crease pattern I was using- it’s really more of a reference line sheet, than anything else. But it’s available to download if you’re interested.

Pentagonal crease pattern

links for 2006-03-06

Star Twist Tessellation v2.1 Crease Pattern

I updated and cleaned up my crease pattern for the Star Twist Tessellation v2.1, and posted it to my diagrams page.

This is one of my favorite designs, although it’s a bit tricky to fold. I’d like to figure out a better folding sequence, but right now all I have is a large, all-at-once collapse method.

Anyhow, give it a try, if you are so inclined. It’s a beautiful pattern, and it repeats infinitely. It would probably be better to call this a “geometric progression” instead of a tessellation, but I’m not going to nitpick about it for the time being.

Licensed under the Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution license. Some rights reserved. (this means you can distribute and use it freely for non-commercial use, as long as you mention who made it!)

Star Twist Tessellation v2.1