Five and Four
The Five and Four is my first ever tessellation, an achievement in the world of origami. It’s quite a simple tessellation, but I went through a lot of ups and downs while creating this origami. I’m going to share with you some of the problems I faced and how I overcame them, finally getting to the end result of this beautiful origami piece.
I made 2 trial “rough draft” tessellations before I made my final origami. I started with the first two pictures below, the ones that look like a plus sign on the paper. I was trying to make the pleat that is used to make all of the squares in this model, called the 90 degree pleat intersection. As you can see in the back-lit version, the layer where the paper overlaps on the edges of the center square are too thin.
I continued to try to figure out the 90 degree pleat intersection until I was fairly good at it. Once I was confident, I went on to try and make the model. But I made the smallest mistake. I made the center square 1 square off center, and that shifted the entire pattern to the lower-right corner of my paper.
Knowing that I messed up this model, I didn’t follow the advice in the book that I found this model in, and didn’t put the model inside a heavy textbook to flatten it. As a result, the entire model curled up, as you can see in the two pictures.
Learning from my mistakes, I went on to make a third and final version of the Five-And-Four tessellation. I actually marked the center of my paper very lightly on the back with a pencil, so that the model would not be off-center. I used my knowledge of the 90-degree pleat intersection to make it as perfect as I could. Once I was done, I put the model inside of the pages of a heavy textbook, and I stacked several heavy objects on top. This resulted in a symmetrical and flat model.
These are the steps I went through when I made my first ever tessellation, the Five-And-Four. I learned from my prior mistakes, and went on to make one of my favorite origami models to date. It was a bit of a struggle, but I persevered, and the effort was proved worthy by the outcome.