We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Madonna Yoder. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Madonna below.

Hi Madonna, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I’d always thought that I would be an engineer or scientist, so when I first considered doing origami as a career that was the side I considered realistic. I was taking a Geometric Folding Algorithms course at the time and seeing all the cool things going on in the world of origami as it intersects with medical devices, deployable devices like solar panels and emergency shelters, mathematics, and other engineering applications.
Soon after, I got an internship writing computational origami code for polycube unfolding and loved every minute of it!
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find funding to continue doing origami in that organization and ended up writing other code instead, which wasn’t nearly as much fun.
As that position was drawing to a close, I realized over the course of many conversations with friends and acquaintances that I actually wanted to be an origami artist and the stars aligned for me to give it a shot!

Madonna, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I help aspiring origami tessellation folders to deeply understand tessellations so that they can fold from crease patterns, reverse engineer from photos, and even start designing their own tessellations. And unlike most origami instructors, I don’t focus on individual designs in tutorials, but instead teach broader structures, theory, and skills so that you can start folding new designs with confidence and get the most out of any tessellation workshop you attend.
I’m always looking under the hood for patterns that can be applied broadly, whether that’s odd division techniques in Tessellation Foundations, how to fold twists in Basic Twists Bootcamp, properties of structures of twists that impact how you design and fold them in Tessellations by Tiles, planning for borders in Project Planning Masterclass, or expanded symmetries in Advanced Twist Techniques.
I know how hard it is to keep up with live instructions, so all my courses are recorded and I’ve gathered together a supportive community of folders that love to help anyone with questions.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

For the first 18 months of my life as an origami artist, I tried the sell-products-on-Etsy-and-my-own-site approach and it just did. not. work. After such a long time of banging my head against the wall, I bought a marketing course and pivoted to teaching.
Having students, even if only a few, helped me focus in on what is most helpful to them and having a method to stick to prevented a lot of indecision.
Since I could now verify what my people wanted, I could see clearly that the way I was doing things before was not solving their problems.
You see, I was selling patterns and people’s biggest problem was not being able to read patterns or successfully fold from patterns.
Now I focus on breaking the patterns down to show the choices underneath, and I’ve done much better as a result.
That said, there’s no resting on my laurels now – I’m constantly trying to figure out how I can help my students even more.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being an origami designer and instructor is when I figure out a fundamental piece of the structure that underlies a set of patterns and then get to see the lightbulb go off in my student’s head when I teach that piece to them. It’s when my students post a photo of a tessellation they’ve folded with pride as they show it to the rest of the community.
And most of all, it’s when one of my students tries something that I’ve never considered before – and it works!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://training.gatheringfolds.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/gatheringfolds
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gatheringfolds
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/gatheringfolds

Image Credits
Madonna Yoder