To facilitate the large-scale creation of origami tessellations for technical applications, a new manufacturing approach is proposed where the material is formed gradually. One pair of moulds is used for the stepwise folding process which introduces a constant increase in deployment degree – starting from the flat sheet material at one end towards a fully deployed state at the other end. The resulting stepwise forming process does not conform to a strictly rigid folding, but tries to locally minimise elastic deformation to enable globally large, quasi-isometric shape changes in the folded sheet. To find such a geometry for a gradually folded Miura-Ori tessellation, a numerical model was created using a dynamic relaxation approach with given boundary conditions for isometry and folding angles. Real-world folding experiments using corresponding additively manufactured moulds were conducted with different materials including papers, plastic, and metal foils, and the quality of the results was analysed.