Monday, January 15, 2018

In Which I Revisit Spirals

I put spiral play on the back burner for much of the second half of 2017, but as the year was coming to an end, I was folding a piece of origami paper diagonally and it reminded me of how I start folding a spiral. The only difference is that spirals use trapezoid shaped paper and this was a square. I decided to try folding it anyway and it worked well. I was journaling about the experiment and wrote "I wonder what would happen if I folded a rectangle corner to corner and spiraled it?" So I did that too and recorded my results in diagrams and samples. Here are the results.

Enjoy!


The first trial using origami paper. This photo shows the model closed.

Here is the model open.

There are two ways to crease the diagonals with the rectangle. Here is version A where I scored each side of the center line from the top of the horizontal line to the bottom corner of the next one. This creates different angles on each side of the model, but it still collapses.

In version B I just scored with the center line folded and creased from the top to the bottom of the longer edge of each horizontal section. That means the diagonal angles are the same on each side, but where they end differs. It looks very much like version A, but is easier to score and collapse.

Here is the model open. I like the way the leaf shapes cross each other in this model. It is very dynamic.