Woven Kusudama, designed by me

I have a few books by Meenakshi Mukerji, and one of them (Ornamental Origami) has these floral balls.  I found the Layered Petunia particularly inspiring, because I had this idea of changing the connections to make different shapes.  The unit wasn’t really strong enough to hold though, so I had to redesign the unit.

This is a recent model that I just finished last month.  I decided to submit this to the East Bay Origami Convention two weeks from now.

This model was made with duo paper, meaning paper that’s a different color on each side.  I had some green/yellow duo paper, red/yellow, and brown/yellow, so I combined them together for this.  There are 12 flowers, each corresponding to the face of a dodecahedron.  The interesting part, is that flowers are not directly connected to adjacent flowers. Instead, each flower is connected via long strips to flowers on the far side of the model.

All around the model, there are places where three strips intersect, and I had to decide which strip would be on top, and which would be on bottom.  It’s tricky to come up with a symmetrical way of doing this, but you know I love doing that sort of thing.  Here’s a diagram showing a partial weaving:

I also made folding diagrams! They’re on Flickr, ask me for a link if interested.