Advent of Tessellations is back for a third year of daily folding fun!
The tutorials will be released daily from Dec. 1-25 on the Gathering Folds website and YouTube channel, and all of the patterns are new, with no duplicates from previous years.
You can sign up for free to get daily email reminders and PDFs of crease patterns for each day’s project as the tutorials come out. When you sign up, you’ll also get the option to access all the tutorials (from all years) as a course with lessons that you can mark as completed as you go.
Most of the patterns this year use 24 grid divisions (12 divisions per side of the hexagon) on a hexagonal sheet of paper, with only Days 1, 24 and 25 using 16 divisions, and you’ll find a tutorial for these grids in the welcome video when you sign up.
The best paper to use for these mini tessellations is Skytone, which is available in packs of 50 sheets here. The paper with hexagon cutting templates and other folding tools is available here.
You’ll be joining hundreds of folders around the world in trying a new tessellation pattern each day, and since the patterns are in a sequence that builds skills, you don’t need much tessellation folding experience to get started.
All of the patterns are folded directly on the grid, without additional precreasing, and only one twist is added at a time.
This year, the focus is on hybrid hexagon twists (Days 16-25) and some unusual ways of using rhombus twists (Days 13-15), and you can find multiple ways to repeat each mini pattern in this year’s ebook of extended patterns, which has 63 different tessellations based on the 25 mini patterns in Advent of Tess.
These three patterns are Inchworm (Day 13), Swallowtail and Butterfly Migration, and they each use the same choices for the first three twists but repeat in different ways:
There are always multiple ways to repeat portions of an origami tessellation, which means that we’ll never run out of new patterns to fold!
Advent of Tess gives a guided tour of a new set of tessellation patterns each year, and it’s designed to help you see tessellations in a new way, whether you’ve just started folding or have been folding tessellations for years. Will you join in the fun this December and fold these infinite patterns for yourself?