Stumbling through my socials, I noticed a video tutorial of a reverse-engineered model originally designed by Ekaterina Lukasheva and knew I needed to try it:

This 30 unit modular ball is a lovely bit of engineering, you make a bow-tie shaped unit and then, via a series of really positive locked tabs in pockets you form groups of 3 units that swirl around 5-unit shaped holes.

I chose Tuttle indigo dye duo paper and split each sheet into 4 squares, meaning the units were small but manageable. Construction was fairly easy – the units lock together fairly well but during construction the whole structure is really floppy. It is not until you have a near sphere that the paper tension kicks in and stabilises the shape – the final unit pulls the sphere round.

The Tuttle paper was a little thin, structure-wise, but folding this from thicker paper would begin to compromise the accuracy of the folding, making it less spherical – an interesting balancing act.

30 unit kusudamas are quite common – the geometry of a sphere lends itself to 3’s and 5’s, as evidenced by the vast majority of my Kusudama work. Fun meditative fold as mass production lets you get lost in the process.