I’ve been having a lot of fun making these little origami lamps. At the moment I’ve designed two sizes, small and medium, and I’m designing the folds for a large size.
I design the folds in Illustrator, and use the laser to score the folds, as well as cut the outline. The outline on the bottom is fairly complex, as it contains slotted tabs to interlock the shade onto the base and legs.
After lasering, I score all the fold lines, then carefully accordion the whole piece together.
In the photo below, you can also see the base, which I also cut on the laser, and press fit onto a standard LED tea candle. The shade locks around the lower ring via the little slotted tabs. Simple and effective!
Thanks! Yup, just paper. I’d bought plastic light diffuser film from inventables, which I was intending to use for the final versions after making the prototypes out of paper. But honestly the paper is so good that now I don’t see any reason to use that plastic film, I’ll save it for some other project.
I would think that the long term survivability of the plastic would be reason enough to go there, I was even thinking about checking various veneers for light transmission.
In any case the look is gorgeous. Far beyond the ones in Star Trek.
Those are really wonderful. I’ve been wanting to try origami shapes. How did you fashion the design? Did you try it in paper first? Trial and error? Did you use Fusion 360…?
Thanks! The very first one I attempted (years ago), I drafted out a small section of the folds on paper with ruler, pencil, and dividers; that took a while. These that I posted, I designed in Illustrator. There’s a lot of measuring and fine tuning required to really dial them in, but you develop an intuition for basically how they’re going to fold up. There is actually origami simulation software out there, but in the case of these lamps, said software would fold it up like an accordion, not revolve it around like a tube, so it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Check out the book “Folding Techniques for Designers” by Paul Jackson. It has many interesting folds you can use to make lamps and sconces, and comes with a CD containing all the crease pattern diagrams!
