Kusudama DIY Project

I had posted previously about Japanese kusudama, which are paper balls, usually made out of flowers or other shapes. The origami skills needs to create these cute little flowers is not anything that should intimidate anyone who hasn't done origami before. But actually finishing a kusudama is time consuming! One kusudama is made up of 12 flowers, or the equivalent of 60 petals.

After a full Sunday afternoon of work, I had my finished my practice kusudama!

I love how delicate yet structured it is! I think it would be perfect to have a long piece of ribbon or even tulle ribbon strung along the side of the pews in my church, with a kusudama here and there.

To make the flowers that make up this kusudama, check out these instructions:

Folding Tree's Kusudama Instructions, part 1

To learn how to take your flowers and turn them into a kusudama, check out these instructions:

Folding Tree's Kusudama Instructions, part 2

You'll need the following to complete a kusudama:

• 60 square pieces of paper (origami or another lightweight paper)
• Glue (I just used white craft glue)
• Optional - bamboo skewer to easily (and cleanly!) spread the glue
• Ribbon - if you want to hang your kusudama

You might be thinking to yourself, where am I going to get all of this paper and just how expensive is it going to be? I was luck enough to find this set of 1,000 pieces of origami paper on Amazon.

Source: Amazon

For $13.95 I received 1,000 sheets of paper divided between 15 different colors, all in this great pattern, shown above. The sheets are 2.75in squares - initially I had thought these would be far too small and almost didn't buy the paper. However, since each square creates a petal, which them becomes part of a flower, and 12 flowers create a kusudama, it really is the perfect size! My kusudama measures about 6 inches around, so is perfectly cute!

The colors in the set includes shades of blues, pinks, yellows, greens and oranges, with rougly 65 pieces of paper per individual color. In the example I made above, I made 6 flowers with the light blue patterned paper. For the other flowers I used a darker blue, however I made the flowers wrong-side out so that they are white with a tint of blue. I really like this effect, and for the wedding I will (of course!) use the green patterned paper and use probably 2 green flowers per kusudama and make the rest white flowers. I should have enough paper for roughly 12 or 13 green flowers to spread out amongst kusudama balls.

I am so happy with this project, despite the amount of time it will take to make these! However, because the folds are very simple, I can easily enlist Mr. S or some bridesmaids to help get the work done as we get closer to the date.

So...ceremony decorations for less than $20? I think that's a very good thing!