Gathering Folds

I teach aspiring tessellation folders to understand the patterns so that they can fold any design!

06/13/2026

Needing to cut out a hexagon before you can fold that shiny new pattern is a huge frustration.

Lots of folders struggle with the quality of the hexagons they cut out, with uneven edges and imprecise corners making it challenging just to fold the grid, too.

Last year I debuted pre-cut hexagons of Skytone on GatheringFolds.com that were the right size for Advent of Tess, and now there's another size available that's perfect for folding more repeats of these patterns - up to 64 grid divisions.
I've also added packs of square Skytone suitable for 64-division grids.

Both sizes of hexagons and the squares of Skytone are now available on both GatheringFolds.com and Origami-Shop.com 🎉🎉
Thanks to Nicolas TERRY and for helping me bring Skytone paper to European tessellation folders!

06/12/2026

There are tutorials for every pattern in this sequence leading up to folding Fruitcake, and four of those tutorials are inside of Tessellation Starter Sequence.

Fruitcake is a 3-star pattern because it has moderate twist difficulty (closed rhombus twists are the most difficult twists used) and moderate structural complexity (one hexagon position, one rhombus position, and three triangle positions in the pattern).

The pattern does get a little dense around the closed triangle twists, but I think this pattern is pretty approachable for anyone who has gotten through 10+ days of an Advent of Tess series.

Let's go through the patterns:
1. Pinwheels (Tess. Starter Sequence): learn closed hexagon and open triangle twists, fold in tiling breaks
2. Hexagon Double Bar Wells (Tess. Starter Sequence, AOT25 tutorial): use hexagon and triangle twists on opposite sides of the paper, learn triangle and compound wraps
3. Rhombus Weave (Basic Twists Bootcamp, Tess. Starter Sequence): learn closed rhombus twists
4. Starry Sky (Basic Twists Bootcamp, Tess. Starter Sequence): learn to use hexagon, triangle, and rhombus twists in the HTRT tiling
5. Citrus Slices (AOT25 tutorial, Tess Garden): practice the HTRT tiling with twists on both sides of the paper
6. Fruitcake (AOT25 ebook, Tess Garden): add groups of four triangles between repeats of the center

Happy - which pattern will you fold next?
I'm happy to send you the tutorial link!

06/11/2026

I folded Fruitcake on a perfect hexagon and ended with a perfect hexagon because the underlying pattern matches up well with a diagonal grid.

In this tiling the repeats line up with the tiling breaks, so the pattern repeats line up with the edge too!

06/10/2026

This pattern is named Fruitcake and you can find the crease pattern in the 2025 Advent of Tess ebook as an alternate ending of Day 7, Citrus Slices.

Fruitcake has extra triangles between the repeats, which sets up a neat boundary effect with the pairs of flagstone closed triangle twists.
Those twists are at the positions of 2-fold rotational symmetry, and the 3-fold position is in the open triangle twists attached to the closed triangles.

You can see all the symmetry points annotated on the pattern in the second image.

06/09/2026

Origami tessellations are infinitely repeating patterns folded from a single sheet of paper.

They look really cool when you shine light through them, and you can start learning this folding wizardry for yourself with my (free) Tessellation Foundations tutorials at training.gatheringfolds.com/start 🎁🧙‍♀️

06/08/2026

It's time to clear up some things that I've been saying.

Some terms come from math, some from fashion, some from the origami community, and some from my own brain, so it can be confusing to hear me talk without a background in all of these different fields.

Join me on Tuesday, June 9 at 10am NY time on YouTube for a livestream defining all the terms I use in origami tessellation folding and design!

The video will be recorded, and both the livestream and the recording afterwards can be found here: https://youtube.com/live/KqVukCV8qKg

06/06/2026

Tessellations, pleats, and twists were very well-represented at the CFC6 exhibition last month.

Here's some highlights from a variety of designers!

06/05/2026

Atolls is still a 2-star difficulty pattern since it uses only basic twists and has five distinct pattern locations - two hexagons and three triangles.

It's in the Hexagons and Triangles 6-fold tiling, one of the basic tilings that everyone learns first, so the main things to practice are folding on both sides of the paper, recognizing symmetry points, and holding more and more complicated patterns in your head.

Here's what you'll learn by folding each of these patterns:
1. Open Hexagon Closed Triangle Weave (Starter Sequence, Advent of Tess 2023): learn open hexagon and closed triangle twists, fold in rings around the center
2. Star Weave (YouTube tutorial, AOT25 ebook): recognize symmetry points, use extended symmetry in the HT6 tiling
3. Chiva Rumbera (Advent of Tess 2024): fold on both sides of the paper, use triangle and compound wraps
4. Convection (AOT24 ebook): use two hexagon positions and two triangle positions in the same pattern
5. Jupiter (YouTube demonstration, AOT24 ebook): move symmetry points even further apart
6. Atolls (YouTube demonstration): use the same symmetries as Jupiter with different placements of the triangles

There's a lot to learn at every stage, but there's also lots of support, with videos available for every pattern except Convection.
Let me know which one you'll fold next and I'll send you the video link!
Happy 🎉🎉

06/04/2026

The border is not aligned with the repeats of Atolls, but I have a consistent amount of border all the way around the pattern.

Why is that? The repeats don't line up with the tiling breaks, and I've chosen to align my grid to the tiling breaks to get an even border.

This means that I folded a custom-rotated grid specifically suited to folding Atolls, and I figured it out from the crease pattern before this design was ever folded.
Yes, there was math involved, but the hardest part was figuring out how the tiling breaks matched up with the crease pattern.

06/03/2026

If you just look at small parts of Atolls, you might assume that you've understood the whole thing while missing the broader picture.

You might think this is Triangle Double Bar Wells or Chiva Rumbera, but this pattern is even more complicated than those!

The only way to see the full picture is to find the positions of global symmetry - to see how the pattern repeats and what's included in one repeat.

Check out the second image for an annotation of the symmetry points over the photo.

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