If you follow my Instagram feed you will have noticed a few pictures of bellows of late. This is related to a commission piece I recently completed (More of which I’ll be able to tell you in early Nov) For now, I’m happy to share with you what I have learned about bellows design. There are a few ways of making bellows, the one I’m using here is based around triangles. In the picture below I’ve marked out the base triangle of a five sided bellows.

Here’s the base triangle for a ten sided bellows. You can see how it is constructed from three adjacent corners on a decagon.

To construct the net for the bellows I places a pair of these same triangles back to back and measured them up. I then used the dimensions to create a grid of triangles in Illustrator.

The grid features the same triangle repeated and stacked.

Here’s the completed layout for the ten sided bellows. (Note that the bellows are rotated ninety degrees compared to the previous picture.

Printed, scored and folded, the finished result looks like this. I’ll make it available as a download shortly. Meanwhile if you have any questions please feel free to ask them in the comments section.