As a palette cleanser in-between gallery projects, I turned to my “must fold” pile and decided to have a crack at PRWorigami’s “Artichoke” Kusudama:

Vaguely resembling Xander Perrott’s “Conglomerate” in overall model morphology, the two designs are really different. “Artichoke” has deepish pockets and tabs, with friction locks whereas Xander’s has much more positive locking – multiple locks per unit.

The folding sequence relies a lot on alignment, making the risk of inaccuracies pretty high – certainly I got better at consistently folding angles as the unit production line progressed, but the points here rely on precision, getting pointy tidy points here is difficult.

I _may_ have made a mistake by tackling this kusudama using 7.5cm purple/white duo Daiso paper – the units result in REALLY fiddly bits, making the tab and pocket docking more and more difficult as the kusudama takes shape. Paper torsion and tension also fight you with each addition the model tried to pull itself apart.

I like the geometry here, each lobe is vaguely icosahedral, but it is really satisfying to hold such a tiny and dense model – 30 pieces in groups of 5 and 3 really can be amazing.