The Origami Forum

Hello fellow origamians!

Origami is not really a hobby of mine, but every now and then I do make origami-lampshades.
It takes an awful lot of time and thought an trial and error to find out the very crease pattern that leads to the lampshade I have in my mind. But it is very rewarding when I finally succeed.
But this time it is different. I just can't figure out the creasing pattern to make this very specific lampshade. I have no problem with creating the upper and lower half separately. But I want to make this lampshade out of one (very) large piece of paper.

I do not know if this is the right place to ask for it, but could anyone of you help me with the creasing pattern? It is of paramount importance to make it out of only one piece. (Some glue is needed of course. That's fine. Otherwise it wouldn't become 3D.)

The lamp itself is called "fukurou", it was designed by Issay Miyake. It is easily found on the internet.

Kind regards from Austria!

I'm not well-versed in corrugations (which is the genre this specific pattern falls into), but your problem doesn't seem that hard to solve. Could you post a picture of what you've figured out for one half?
All you'd have to do is join two of the halves together on one edge and work with that shape.

If you are interested in that kind of folds Tomoko Fuse's book Spiral - Origami Art Design might be of interest to you: https://viereck-verlag.de/produkt/spira ... -design-2/
It is a very large book and rather expensive, but most likely the most comprehensive in its area.

Apart from that you might be interested in Origami models like Jeff Beynon's Spring into action. It uses a very similar technique as the lamp, only with equal distances, whereas the lamp varies the distances to get more volume in the middle of the model.

Hey you two, thanks for your replies!

Of course I can show you how far my own research has come. The following two pictures show creasing patterns which should produce the two halves of the lamp:





I found those patterns in two pdf-articles:
https://jiangmeiwu.com/wp-content/uploa ... 17-383.pdf
http://vipsi.org/ipsi/conferences/files ... ucture.pdf

Some guy on Youtube is creating such two structures to combine them to one, resulting in the lampshade I want to build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGMhTcsgaI

But there must be some way to make the whole lampshade out of one piece of paper. You can clearly see that the designer who made the lamp I am trying to reproduce did not use two halfes, but only one piece:














So if any of you could send me a sketch of how the creasing pattern would have to look like, I would be eternally grateful. It doesn't have to look perfect. I just need to understand the basic principle of the creasing pattern.
I will figure out the exact lenghts/angles on my own.


Btw, that book of Tomoko Fuse looks amazing. I love those geometrical shapes. I will try to get a cheap used copy of it.

The simplest method would be to print the shape twice and join them both along a long edge. You just need to make sure the edges correspond with one another; as long as the rotation still works, though, that shouldn't be too difficult.

Correct, but it is exactly what I want to avoid. I want to make the lampshade out of only one piece of paper. That's why I came to this platform to see if any of you can figure it out. Unfortunately I'm a total novice when it comes to creating creasing patterns. :/

Apologies if I wasn’t clear. It would still technically be from one contiguous sheet of paper, albeit an oddly-shaped one. There are a few steps to get the shape needed for the whole pattern, and you’ll need image-editing software:
1. Make the background of the singular shape transparent.
2. Copy the image and paste it beside itself.
3. Rotate the copied image and reposition it such that two corresponding long edges touch.
Then you can print the image, cut it out, and fold. You’ll have to glue the edges regardless.
Again, sorry for not being more clear.

Looking at the second to last picture I get the feeling that the answer to the problem might be to start with a hexagonal paper and make kind of a corrugated tessellation.

I have spent the last couple of days with finding the appropriate angles to match the shape of the lampshade shown in my posting above. That was kinda easy.
But still, I can't figure out a way how to make the lampshade out of one (!) big piece of paper instead of two halves.

Here you can see the creasing pattern I came up with:



If you fold orange, pink and green and glue it together on the red edges you get one half of the lampshade. If you would make two of them and glue them together, it would make one whole lampshade.

Since I want to make it out of one piece of paper, I need to add the 2nd half of the creasing pattern below the green part. You can see I tried that by adding the blue parts: They are a copy of the green parts, just inverted. But as you can clearly see, this does not work. I would need to glue many parts together.

I am starting to think that it is simply not possible to make the lampshade out of one piece of paper (without excessive usage of glue ). Could anyone verify this? That would still leave one question open: How did Issey Miyake manage to do it...

Baltorigamist wrote:1. Make the background of the singular shape transparent.
2. Copy the image and paste it beside itself.
3. Rotate the copied image and reposition it such that two corresponding long edges touch.
Then you can print the image, cut it out, and fold. You’ll have to glue the edges regardless.

Dear Baltorigamist, thanks a lot for your reply! Unfortunately I was not able to understand how to do that. Could you elaborate please? Seems to be a very different approach to mine, which sounds great.

origami_8 wrote:Looking at the second to last picture I get the feeling that the answer to the problem might be to start with a hexagonal paper and make kind of a corrugated tessellation.

If this helps, I'll definitely try it! But I can't figure how this pattern would need to look. Is there any crude example on the internet you could show me?

Something along those lines:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42673512@N00/32789946065