I am often given 6″ origami paper by well-intentioned friends who know I do origami and assume 6″ paper is useful to me. I have lots of it – and I mostly use it to fold kusudama:

I had a pile of duo Tuttle watermelon/lime duo paper, so resolved to treat it to make it more interesting. I bought some acrylic inks a while back, and a mouth airbrush, so decided to tone the pages while learning how the airbrush works – a fun experiment.

I chose to spatter the watermelon side with white ink, and the lime side got yellow and black spatters. The effect is quite lovely and delicate – it compliments the geometry of the model really well.

I had seen a youtube tutorial of Kovács Vincéné’s “Nova” kusudama, and I thought the geometry really interesting. Like many spikey balls, 30 units in 5/3 clusters makes a nice little structure.

Halving each of the 15 treated squares into 2:1 rectangles, I began folding modules. After I had a few, I test-connected them and noticed how nicely the speckles set the paper off – I must remember this technique.

Assembly was pretty easy – the modules lock together really securely so the twist and wrangle of adding modules foes not overly deform the already constructed ones. This is different to most of the kusudamas I have folded which require 2 sets of hands to hold it together while it tries to pull itself apart. The last module is not much more difficult to add than the first (I did resort to tweezers to clip the lock as my fat fingers did not easily fit in the inbetween spaces), quite a satisfying model.

This will be part of a new Library display that goes in next month – I am trying to include more new folds just to mix things up a bit.

Fun fold.