Week 3 of A Blog Named Hero's Christmas event is all about decor. I don't really make papercrafted decor items for around the house, except for at Christmastime! I decided to go all out and make something I've never tried before - a Kusudama ball.
Kusudama flowers are origami flowers made by folding a square of paper for each petal. You can stop at 5 petals to make 1 flower, but the ball that I made has 12 flowers in it - that's 60 petals! That's a lot of folding!
I started out by using patterned paper from Lawn Fawn and American Crafts - Amy Tangerine. However, after making a few flowers this way, I decided to use thinner paper, as the thicker paper was a little too hard to fold the muliple times necessary for each petal. I then moved on to normal printer paper, but I stamped on the edges to make it more pretty!! I used Hero Arts, CAS-ual Fridays, Neat and Tangled, Avery Elle and Simon Says Stamp stamps on the petals.
The petals all start out as a square of paper:
They get folded into petals, then 5 petals are glued together:
(you can find a photo tutorial on folding the petals HERE)
12 flowers all folded and ready to assemble - I was a bit worried about glueing them all together, but that bit turned out to be really easy!
OMGorgeous! Your Kusudama ball is stunning - and at 12 flowers, absolutely full-on a labour of love! Thanks for sharing this; and the tutorial = added bonus!!
ReplyDeletec
Thank you so much, these are beautiful.
ReplyDeletelove the ball. It is really stunning. I can't wait to make them. Thanks for the advice on the paper weight.
ReplyDeleteSo pretty and so creative! Merry Christmas!
ReplyDeleteI love Kusudama flowers, you made a great hanging decoration out of them :) I just want to ask you..is there a "technique" that you use to keep a big space in between of the petals? The ones that i make barely have a small hole in the middle when i assemble all the petals together.
ReplyDeleteI love kusudama flowers!! And you made a really great hanging decoration out of them!! I just wanted to ask you if there's a specific "techinque" that you use to keep a hole in between of the petals. When i assemble the petals there's just a very small space left in the middle (like in the tutorial you added) and the ones you made have a bigger space!
ReplyDeleteI found that the flowers that were from patterned paper (ie thicker paper) ended up with a bigger hole than the ones from computer paper. I suspect that is because they were more difficult to fold, and so the folds were not as sharp.
Delete