In our last post about the petals, we managed to work up a solution with individual petals and a central bud that would house the lights. There were two small wrinkles in the soup with this concept, on the aesthetic front it looks a little too cute for our tastes, and more importantly the midribs add additional weight. Neither of those problems are huge, but the hope of a weight reduction led us back to some of our early paper-folding tests. These tests were abandoned at the time, since our mood board led us in a different direction.

Especially the variations on herringbone tessellations re-sparked our interest, because the folding provides the material with its own strength without the need of additional weight. 

The first step was to evenly stitch together a long strip of five sheets of this tessellation. By stitching, we of course mean duct taping.

As seen above, this round strip of folded paper was re-attached to the mechanism. Unfortunately it was difficult to move it evenly, annoyingly lining up with our initial concerns with this technique. However those early ideations were unreflected and concerned with squashing and stretching a cylinder, which that particular configuration is too stable to allow.

Luckily the geometry is more malleable with respects to widening the top perimeter, but is still a bit finicky. Our duct tape methodology did however lead us in a new direction. 

What if we don’t stitch the sections all the way, but rather focus the adhesion on the middle parts of the “leaves”? A bit of folding and a bit of experimental snipping later, something promising was assembled.

Now all we gotta do is tweak the CAD files for this new configuration and formalize the final folding pattern for the petals to have the moving section where we want it to be. 

Stay tuned for more as well as work on the central section.