Complex Origami Sculpture: K3 - 20 Woven Triangles - No Glue

by joettle in Craft > Paper

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Complex Origami Sculpture: K3 - 20 Woven Triangles - No Glue

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Hola instructablers!

This weave was first folded by Byriah Loper (I think.) Anyway the folding and assembly are surprisingly simple, but create a nice effect. There is obviously no glue involved. There are no official instructions/diagrams for this, as far as I am aware...

This model will take you about 10 hours to do in total, about 7 hours of folding and another 3 or so for construction. The beauty of modular origami is of course that you don't have to do it all in a single sitting, but you can take your time and fold a few pieces a day over the course of 2 weeks or so.

Kinda similar to my other instructable, K2, but substantially easier. This is folded using 20 equilateral triangles, which form 5 tetrahedra, which are then woven together in the classic manner.
The whole model forms a dodecahedron if you plot each of the vertexes in space. Great mathsy fun!

The model I folded was tiny, i would recommend using much bigger paper. I had to do a lot of it with tweezers.The diameter of the final model is going to be (roughly) 1,5x the length of each of your pieces.


What you will need:

60 1x5,5 rectangles (I used 1x6, but it was a little bit loose. I would recommend using something a bit smaller, but if you want to play it safe go for 1x6).

Some sticky tape (just for the construction, if you have super steady hands and lots of patience it's not necessary).

Tea and good music to keep you company (origami is not exactly a very social hobby!).

OK lets get started!

Starting Out

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Basics.

Valley fold in quarters, then crease the top right hand edge to the 1/8th mark. This is just a guideline, don't fold all the way.

Rotate and repeat on the bottom.

60 Degree Folds

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Again, basics. If you have folded the 5 intersecting tetrahedra you can skip this whole section and jump to the assembly.

Fold the top left corner to the guideline crease you made in the previous step and unfold.
Repeat at the bottom.

Folds

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Fold the top right corner to the line you just made. Unfold.

Sink the top left corner in.
Tuck the flap under.

Repeat on the bottom.

Fold the whole business in half to make sure everything is flat and neat :)

Assembly!

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Ok so here the fun begins.

Stick in the flaps, but unlike the 5IT don't stick 3 together, just 2 at each join and make an equilateral triangle, as shown.

Corners

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Put 3 triangles together at each corner of the tetrahedra, and sellotape them as shown to help them to hold to gether while you're assembling the model.

4 triangles makes a tetrahedra.

Weaving

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The weaving from here on is exactly the same as the construction for the 5 intersecting tetrahedra, except that you must make your tetrahedra out of triangles first. I would recommend first folding the 5IT before attempting this, as the triangles can get confusing if you don't have a concept of the weaving already.

Very simple concept to grasp, but the practical application can get tricky with triangles falling all over the place.

I've attached some photos of steps along the way, but they probably wont be very helpful :)
Good luck!

Done!

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Well done!
Not so hard, once you get into it :)
Post photos if you get it done!