spring pick-me-up: kusudama flowers

Paper flowers, now saving blooms everywhere.

If you’ve known me since… oh, high school, you know that I’m not much the flowery type. In fact, I wrote a speech my senior year decrying the murder of plants for silly uses like home decor and anniversary gifts. The thing is, I actually do like the way flowers look. I just don’t think we should go around chopping them up for their prettiness. And fake flowers? Preposterous.

So, what’s a girl to do?

I decided to make my own and turned to the Internet, where I discovered kusudama (Japanese models composed of paper flowers). Perfect!

There are several different variations of the kusudama flower. I liked this one, but I ended up changing a few things to make it easier on myself. Once you get the hang of it, these flowers are super easy to make and, in my opinion, not nearly as infuriating as other types of origami can be.

Pro tip: It might seem obvious, but you’re going to be folding this paper several times. The thicker the paper, the harder (and uglier) this project is going to be. Some might say using origami paper works best, but I can’t vouch for that.

Materials:
5-6 sheets of square paper (The size depends on how big you want your flower to be — mine were 4-inch squares)
Glue/clear tape (I used both)
Helpful: Something to press the paper folds (I used my bamboo pointer/creaser, meant for sewing)

Here we go:
We’ll make each petal first individually. Fold the paper in half diagonally (“right” side out, if you’re using two-sided paper).

I really love that bamboo thing.

Unfold, then fold in half to form rectangles. Unfold again, then fold in half perpendicular to the last fold.

Unfold. You should have something like this:

Three folds!

Fold along the diagonal, then fold the two corners toward the middle along the existing creases, creating two flaps. (You’ll probably need to re-press all the folds to make everything lay nice and flat.)

So far, this reminds me of whoppers. Does anyone else remember those?

Fold the inside edge of one flap to its outside edge. Repeat on the other side.

Open up the folds you just created, then flatten them to create a diamond. (Apparently I didn’t take a photo of this step, but you can get it from the next one, I think.)

Now you’ve got some options. If you’re using two-sided paper and don’t want your flower to have any color variation, fold the tops of the diamonds away from you and tuck the flap inside the diamond. (If your paper is the same color on both sides, it won’t matter which way you do this step.)

The triangles on the sides were diamonds, before the fold/tuck happened.

If you’re using two-sided paper and do want some variation, make the folds toward you, like so:

This might be confusing: on this petal, the white is the correct side.

Fold the flaps in half lengthwise along the existing creases.

At this point, you should be back to (basically) a square.

Bring the flap edges together (don’t make any folds!) and secure with tape, glue, etc. I used clear tape, since it won’t be visible and it’s faster than waiting for glue to dry. Ta-da! Your first petal.

Petals galore!

Repeat the above and make 4 or 5 more petals. (I think 5 petals total works better than 6, personally.)

Once you’ve got all your petals done, you’re ready to glue them together. I used hot glue, again, mostly because I didn’t want to wait for regular glue to dry.

Add a bit of glue along the edge of one petal and attach another petal. From here, it’s pretty simple — just repeat this step until all the petals are attached. You’ll want to line them up so that a small circle is formed on the inside.

That's almost a circle, there.

And, this is not even close.

Look! Aren’t they cute? I think I’ll glue in some wire and stick a couple in a vase. Take that, florists!

Brandon got me the fancy bowl in Costa Rica!