Tessellation Garden

Who is Tessellation Garden for?

If you've folded your first few (or few dozen) origami tessellations and are looking for stunning patterns to fold that don't spend all day on precreasing and difficult collapses, you're in the right place.

The vast majority of the 500+ designs in Tessellation Garden can be folded directly from the grid and look stunning at all scales, from prototype to masterpiece.

Each crease pattern includes a recommendation for grid alignment and is linked to the next-easier and next-harder pattern so you can calibrate your projects to your current skill level.

Tessellation Garden is a library, not a course - it will not teach you how to read crease patterns, but it does provide hundreds of examples of crease patterns and their folded forms.

Explore the breadth and depth of origami tessellations

Most origami designers publish their work in books, which take years to make and are limited to a curated few designs that showcase their unique style.

My approach is different - I want you to be able to see all the tessellations I've explored, whether I folded a display-worthy version of the pattern or not.

You see, most of my designs don't end up being posted to social media - they're prototypes, demonstrations of feasibility - and even the ones I do post usually have a 1-year gap between when they're folded and when they're posted.

My design specialties include unexpected combinations of shapes, unexpected repetition styles in familiar arrangements of shapes, and unexpected twists - all of which can still be folded directly from the grid.

This means that you'll be exposed to the frontier of origami tessellation knowledge in Tessellation Garden and see enough examples of each technique to spark ideas of your own to fill in the gaps between my designs and explore new areas for yourself.

Focused on Progression

If you pick up a crease pattern out in the wild, you typically won't know if you have the skills to fold it.

That's why all of my patterns are sorted into difficulty categories based on twists used and structural complexity.

I also make suggestions on each pattern's download page for which tessellation to practice beforehand and which one to try next.

That way you can calibrate your folding to the level of difficulty that will best help you learn and also practice many variations on a theme to help understand more general principles.

Each difficulty category page shows what related patterns have video instructions and whether they've been taught in my other courses too.

This system of categorization and practice pattern recommendations allows you to construct as long of a path to mastery of a given pattern as you need instead of relying on the 6-pattern paths that I publish on social media.

Descriptive Documents

Each crease pattern comes with a cover page and annotation of the underlying structure, so you'll never open a file and not know which pattern it is.

The cover pages include information on the tiling and twists used, as well as the recommended grid rotations for borders or pattern alignment and also my assessment of the difficulty of the pattern.

The included photos show both sides of the folded tessellation, which means that you can check your folding as you go - whether you have internet service or not!

Each crease pattern is shown on a 64-fold grid that matches the recommended paper shape to fold the pattern on (square, triangle on hexagon, or triangle on square), and every 8th grid line is bolded for ease of counting.

The recommended center of the tessellation is in the center of the crease pattern and the exact grid that you use is up to you.

Since the Project Planning Masterclass is included with your purchase of Tessellation Garden, you'll have full training on how to plan your projects from these crease patterns.

Complementary Resources

Tessellation Starter Sequence

This course of 50 video lessons is designed to teach you all the foundational tessellations that set up the skills to fold the rest of the tessellations in Tessellation Garden. Many of these designs are not included in Tessellation Garden since they were designed by other folders.

I recommend this course for folders who are new to tessellations and need to learn how to read crease patterns.

Tessellations by Tiles

This course teaches 20 arrangements of twists (called tilings) and how to fold and design in those structures. Tessellation Garden has at least half a dozen designs in each of those 20 tilings and the lessons learned apply to all the 46+ tilings in Tessellation Garden.

I recommend this course for folders who want to learn to design their own tessellations and learn general folding principles.

Advanced Twist Techniques

This course demonstrates and explains new structrures and twists that I come up with each year. These will generally be the same structures and twists that I've recently added to Tessellation Garden, so you can get an annual update on the latest things I've been thinking about.

I recommend this course for folders who enjoy the challenge of puzzling out new designs.

Project Planning Masterclass

This course teaches how to plan your tessellation project from a crease pattern, taking folding skill into account, and is included with your purchase of Tessellation Garden.

What are you waiting for?

Not everything needs to be folded at display scale like the photos I've shown here - you can always start with a 16-fold grid on any pattern to try out the central motif.

Not everything needs to be folded on a rotated grid either, and there's plenty of simple patterns and grid-aligned patterns in Tessellation Garden too.

One thing is for sure, though - if you never get the patterns, you're never going to fold them.

If you've got questions I'm happy to answer them - send me an email and I'll get back to you right away!