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Landscape 2 : mountains mirrored in a lake, moonlight, backlit

Another wonderful origami tessellation-inspired landscape work from Mélisande. I think the descriptive title is self-explanatory.

I really enjoy these works of hers, and I hope she continues with this very inspirational line of art!

See previous coverage of this genre here:

Origami Landscape: Stars and Clouds over the Mountains


Papercraft: How to make a Concertina Book!

Dreaming Spirals has this great photo howto on making a Concertina book. It’s two covers with a stack of preliminary bases, flipflopping back and forth in sets of two to make a nice, origami inspired book. the pages expand out and open while you’re reading it! A very cute and fun papercraft, I think.

Liz Plummer (the author of site) has done a great job showing all the steps; I encourage you to give it a look, and think about making someone YOU know a special little book for Christmas! If you’re an origami fanatic like me, I’m guessing you probably have a nice stash of paper squirreled away… now’s the time to break out the lokta, washi, unryu, or whatever and use it for this project.

here’s a few steps to whet your appetite:

UPDATE: Hey! the nice people over at Make: Magazine picked this up on their blog!

Floor pattern 4 (Mélisande’s tessellations)




Floor pattern 4

Originally uploaded by Melisande*.

Mélisande posted this a while back, and I missed it due to the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States.

It’s a variation on her “cathedral floor patterns”, which has an interesting arrangement of large and small hexagons interspersed with trapezoids. a new and unique tiling, from my perspective.

don’t forget to check out the flip side, as well as the backlit version on her flickr photostream!

you can see her pre-folding sketches on her website, here:



Tokyoahead – Masters of Origami Exhibition, Hangar 7, Salzburg

Tokyoahead – Masters of Origami Exhibition, Hangar 7, Salzburg

I found a nice photo gallery of the exhibits from the Masters of Origami exhibition in Austra this year. Since the website for the event was practically unusable due to a horrendous flash design, I found this to be much more approachable.

I had a chance to see the book produced for this event last Sunday at our monthly Origami Minnesota meeting. (thanks Carol!) It’s quite well put together, although as always I would have preferred more images. Not sure it is worth the cost, but I’m more of a blueprint kind of guy, and less a coffee-table-book person.

Here’s a few images from the website:

edit: hotlinked photos don’t work. Sorry, Tokyoahead.com webmaster! my apologies.

Please proceed to the website directly to check out the photos. thanks!

Thomas Heatherwick: The Rolling Bridge

Found this wonderful design via we-make-money-not-art. It’s a flexible, contracting pedestrian bridge by Thomas Heatherwick, which collapses upon itself to create an octagonal shape when not in use. It’s all hydraulics, and it looks fascinating.

More info here:



He’s also currently working on an innovative Japanese buddhist temple design, based on folded/crumpled/draped fabric:

Thomas Heatherwick: Interview

UPDATED: these additional photos from PingMag!