New on Etsy

So here, finaly I put myseft together and I opened my own Etsy shop! Everybody was asking me why I dont sell the things, so I decided to give a try.

First thing on etsy is of course my favorite kusudama. Christmas is comming and I decided these realy small flower balls (round 4 -5 cm width) decorated with beads can make a good start. 

To make these tiny kusudamas is a bit more dificult then a bigger ones. I used a pincet to fold these small squeres of paper. And each flower is decorated with bead. Also I made a small nearly invisable loop for the string or ribbon. In this way ribbon can be easily changed acording to any need without cutting the old one.

It takes some time to make it so small, but I really like the result. I am sure these mini kusudamas can be on the top of christmas tree. Not of cource nesisarely for christmas - I hanged one on a mirror in my car.

Anyway, I am new on Etsy. It takes some time to understand how it works, but as they say in Cyprus siga siga (eng. slowly slowly) we get there. And I promise there will be some more!

This and that

It's been a while since I posted something. Still problems with internet. Oh, well. It's Cyprus! But it doesn't mean I stop playing with paper and stuff. In fact have some new materials to play with, and some new ideas too. But before I want to share something I've been working lately. Just some pictures from this and that. 

The smallest traditional Japanese crane. More about it in here.

Kanzashi flower brooch. I wrote a little bit about material flowers in here. I'm stuck a little bit with making these, but I already found some good tricks how to make things easier. Like for example I actually used gelatin to make fabric more like paper, so it makes measuring,cutting and folding processes much easier. More difficult to sew thought. Anyway, I promise a full and detailed post after I finally finish experimenting. 

One more bird - sort of peacock - for 3D origami family. I saw the instruction somewhere and I'm sure it's easy to find a few versions of it on internet but to tell you the truth I was absolutely improvising. 

Oh and this thing now is on the wall in my new temporary  bedroom. Just tried to make it look more cosy. Oh well, I borrowed the words from proverb "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow" and added "feel" to it. And also butterflies. I finally managed to sit down with an amazing Michael G. La'Fosse's origami butterfly book and actually learn how to make few sorts of there creatures.

I thought it might be fun to make a dream catcher with kids. Using all these bright colour feathers and breads I have. And in between experiments I'm still making kusudamas. Here are a few:

Mini kusudama

From one extreme to another :) 

After rather unsuccessful giant sonobe project I've decided to try to make a really small kusudama. After some searching and a few trials I've decided that the same sonobe ball will be just perfect to make mini kusudama. And what do you know! Here we have a few small balls. I folded them, glued a bit and varnished a few times. Now they are firm and shiny and can be used as a pendant for cell phone, set of keys or anywhere you like.

Sakuradama

This famous kusudama was created by Toshikazu KAWASAKI. It took me some time to read this only diagram I could find. But you can always check lessons on youtube.

I really enjoyed making this because you need only 30 modules and no glue to put it together! So I made one from light blue paper with white pearls and the other one I folded from map. So this kusudama has a whole map of Troodos mountains on :)

Art cube

I saw some really inspiring pictures of different paper crafts especially kusudamas. That's how I got that folding possession first of all. Flower balls do look nice but if you have a special way of showing that - they look just amazing! Here are a few pictures created by Fredy. It's just a piece of art in cube isn't it? :)

Sonobe balls

Do you remember my rather unsuccessful giant Sonobe project? The ball wasn't round and very firm. So I decided to use the same units and make a lot of small balls. Which is quiet easy to make the instruction you can find here. As you don't use any glue and the paper was pretty hard it was really easy to take it apart. Soon I made six balls and gave them to Fredi who made these amazing pictures!

More kusudamas. More news.

No no no, I'm not gone anywhere and our workshop still working one hundred pro cent unfortunately it can't be said about my camera. Have some problems with my camera so for some time I couldn't make any pictures of new crafts to show you. Broken camera is a bad news but I also have a good one! I found a photographer - Fredi - who is going to make best pictures of whatever I make. So from now on there will be best pictures for my posts and a big gallery. I tried to make a slide show, unfortunately pictures are a bit too small in there. So if anybody knows how to make a sideshow a bit bigger I could use your advise because I'm much better with the paper that with technologies.

What else new? A brand new kusudama! Just joking. Although I said I will never try make anything without any instruction I did it again. So I was trying to make curler kusudama (video instruction you can find here) but as I said I wasn't actually following instructions so I twisted the corners the wrong way, and here is what I made by accident:

Infinity

This flower ball is called Infinity. It's also called kusudama, but the technique of making it is totally different. Technique of this flower ball is like modular origami which means you make 30 modules which are not actually a flowers in this case, just after you put units together you get a flower :)

It's quite easy to make a unit, you have a very clear video lesson in here. Putting the units together might take some patience but, I mean, come on it's only 30 of them not 300 :) I used a bit of glue to make smaller - green one, to make black one I didn't use a drop of glue. 

 

Icosahedron

Yesterday night I finally finished Icosahedron project. Have to tell you that it wasn't the easy one and it took me aged to glue parts together. A saw this project in a picture where it looks absolutely gorgeous and for a week or even more I was trying to find the folding instruction on the Internet. The problem was, that on the picture it says "kusudama",  but it's not. In fact you can't really call it origami, thought it is made of paper. The thing is that u need to cut special shapes from paper, fold them a bit and then glue them together. It takes a lot of patience, especially tricky is to glue the last units, but practice makes perfect!

Here is ready template which you can use, just printing 10 pages or you can cut the form and put it on the colour paper as I did. I'm always trying to save the paper so I managed to fit 3 units on one piece of paper. On the same blog you can find folding details.

Single flower variations

At the moment I'm working on two brand new projects but they are not finished so for today - a few traditional kusudama variations. You'll be surprised how you can make totally different flower balls by using the same folding instruction.

This kusudama is called Venus. You make the same flowers and put one into another. I made the second flowers a bit smaller, but it's possible to make them the same size and put one into another. Actually you can try to put one into another much more flowers.

This one is called Pluto. Still the same flowers you just don't fold in the petals and you get a thorny piece of art.  Experimenting is fun, so I made one by mixing those two models. I folded in petals of bigger flower but I left unfolded of smaller one which I put inside. Here's what we get:

Kusudama dolls

As I already mentioned, the greatest thing about traditional Japanese kusudama is that once you know how to fold one flower you can make not only hundreds of different flower balls but also you can make a dolls for example as we did today.

I found quite a few video lessons on youtube.com but we had to improvise anyway. I didn't have a foam ball for head so I used a cotton. Also I don't like gluing so I just sewed flowers together. And the rest is just improvisation. Here is the result :)

It's fun and easy to learn! And for sure if you making a simple doll it will take much less time than to make a flower ball :)

We made a few more:

Traditional Japanese kusudama

The smallest flower ball I made so far

Traditional Japanese kusudama is one of my favorites because you don’t need to glue it just sew flowers together. These flowers are quite easy to fold and there are loads of different variations how to make different kusudamas by using the same flowers.

I started making them for Christmas; you can even use it as a decoration for a Christmas tree and for sure it makes a great present and not only for Christmas but for any other occasion. Now it became some kind of obsession and I keep making different flower balls using paper of all different kinds and sizes. I use color paper, present paper, I even folded a few from magazine. Just be sure that the paper you using isn’t to hard because it makes more difficult to fold flowers and sometimes fingers getting really tired :)

You can find a very clear video lesson are here. Enjoy!

Kusudama

The Japanese kusudama (medicine ball) is a paper model that is usually created by sewing or gluing multiple identical units together, usually stylized pyramidal flowers folded from square paper.