Silent Night

Images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

I planned to fold this model for Christmas, but it took me a while longer. Each of the spruce trees is slightly different, and they represent Joseph, Mary, and Jesus if you’re into metaphors.

In order to avoid having a pleat going up from the central tree, I employed a pleat-shifting technique which moves the pleat to the Star of Bethlehem while leaving the central part of the sky clear. This shift uses up a lot of paper and results in a very thick, multi-layer horizontal pleat in the center. The dark green, thick metallic paper I used matches the Christmas theme well, but it made the pleat even more visible and distorted the model somewhat. On the upside, adding those extra layers allowed me to design the model on a square rather than a rectangle.