Stars and Squares Tessellation

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Yet another fine example of me reinventing the wheel. After I designed this pattern, I found out it had been already published — in 1982 (!) — by no less than Shuzo Fujimoto. According to the description of this model, folded by Raymonde Bonnefille, the crease pattern can be found in Fujimoto’s Invitation to Creative Playing with Origami (創造する折り紙遊びへの招待). Since I don’t have the book and could not find any name for this tessellation, I refer to it by the name I planned for my “original” design, Stars and Squares. Update: now that I’ve got all of Fujimoto’s books, I still can’t find any name for this model other than it’s one of his translucent designs (The image is marked C7 in Twist Origami I but that seems to be more of an image caption than model name). The ID in Catalog of Fujimoto’s Works is CFW 53.

Folding is very simple: the squares are just Kawasaki/Square Twists and the stars are the same twists with the radial angles of the squares bisected and tucked below each other (this process is called pursing — thanks for your remarks, Robin Scholz). Each molecule requires a 4×4 grid, so the whole model featured here uses a 24×16 grid. This is a pretty good model to teach tessellations to beginners: it’s not much harder than plain Square Twists but looks much more interesting. Compare with Stars and Triangles which is this design’s analog on the hex grid.

Folded from Elephant Hide paper, inkjet-colored magenta. More about this coloring method in a separate blog post.