Now that the days are at their shortest and daylight is minimal, it’s a perfect time for crafting items that add some joy and colour to the days. I have been playing with the idea of picking up my pastels and make a painting, but I have not started yet. Too little daylight time, and I don’t really enjoy working with the light of my daylight lamp. It’s fine for smaller drawings (though still a bit too greyish in colour to my taste), but I want to make something bigger: take out my easel and put an A3 size sheet of paper on it.
So I do other things, and that’s fine too. I’m spinning my beautiful silvery pink rolags and they are a joy to spin. I play with my music editor. And I make kusudama’s.
The most recent ones I made are the Alina kusudama and the Farandola Granda (both designs from Ekaterina Lukasheva). The Alina kusudama was quite some work. First I had to fold the 30 units, then assemble the sphere, and then pry open the petals. I made it even harder by using five different colours of paper (which of course needed to be arranged just right). I used 7.5×7.5 cm paper and the finished sphere is about 11 cm in diameter.
Alina kusudama, before opening the petals.
I made a picture before the last step, partly because I was not sure whether I would like the kusudama more with open or with closed petals. But as I was working with paper of which only one side was coloured, I decided to open them.
Opening the petals was quite a lot of work. I managed to avoid tearing the petals (mostly), but it was not easy. The result is quite nice, though.
A fun thing about these petals is that the folds that are opened kind of look like leaf nerves, thus making the petals even more realistic.
Yesterday I made another ball. This time I used the standard 15×15 cm origami paper. It was the first time that I made a kusudama out of paper that large. I had bought a small set of paper that was red on one side and gold on the other. Perfect for Christmas time, right?
The sonobes for the Farandola Granda were a bit tricky to make at first, but after making 30 of them, they are easy peasy. I assembled the sphere, and this time it is an open sphere. Every vertex still has five incoming edges, just like with any icosahedron, but the sonobes are a bit apart. A nice effect! The finished ball is now hanging at the window, and I like it!
The picture doesn’t really do it justice. It seems as if the gold is just plain brown paper. In lamplight it gets a very nice golden sheen, however. I like how both colours of the paper get a chance to shine in this kusudama.
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