Notes on Tant Paper

I folded Lucky Star Fractal Tessellation from a sheet of grey Tant paper which I bought at the CDO convention in Italy. I use Tant paper a lot, so I was happy to finally get some really large sheets. Unfortunately, I soon noticed that something was wrong: whereas the Tant I knew and loved was pretty strong, this paper was on the verge of tearing in points where more than a few precreased lines intersected.

By coincidence, at almost the same time, I learned from Ekaterina Lukasheva that Tant comes in several different weights, not only 80 gsm as I previously thought. Apparently, the sheet I bought was the 60 gsm version which explains why it was weaker than the standard.

In the end, I managed to fold the model without tearing the paper, but several times it was a close call: this tessellation is rather hard to collapse. This is because of the ordering of the layers. I’m pretty sure there is no way to rigid-fold the molecule, and it is possible in practice only due to the paper’s flexibility. Collapsing the tessellation is much harder than collapsing an individual star since the molecule’s surroundings limit the mobility of paper at its edges.