Origami

A love letter to kusudamas

Kusudamas

Kusudamas originate from ancient Japan, where they were originally used to hold incense and potpourri;
they traditionally consisted of many units being threaded together into a sphere. Modular origami is a style of origami that uses identically repeating paper units that can be assembled via folding alone, to form a cohesive structre. The friction between pieces of paper allows for a 3D shape without any glue, threading, or other external adhesive. I am specifically interested in kusudamas that do not require glue or threading, and modular origami as a whole. The kusudamas I make are almost all icosahedral in nature; thus the number of paper units needed to assemble each kusudama must be an integer multiple of thirty.

I started folding origami when I was ~12 years old, but only became interested in modular origami after high school. The first wave of COVID lockdowns found me bored in my room with a stack of origami paper, and it seems I have been folding kusudamas ever since. It takes me anywhere from 5 to 20 hours to make a kusudama, although I have never timed myself. I often fold kusudamas when I am stressed, since I find the repetitive motions calming. I have played around with designing my own kusudamas; however, most of my creations are taken from online tutorials or books. If you are interested in folding your own, I recommend PRWorigami on Youtube -- they have many kusudama tutorials that are not too hard.

A collection of my kusudamas can now be found in the Penn Women's Center.

Below is a non-extensive gallery of some of the kusudamas I have made so far! You can see more in each row by hovering your cursor over the right or left edge :^)

Bouquets, Boutonnieres & More!

I also fold origami bouquets, boutonnieres, and corsages for special events such as school proms and homecomings. I'm not actually sure if these still qualify as origami, since attaching stems and ribbons requires materials that are obviously not paper -- we use green wire for stems, ribbon as decoration, and hot glue to hold all the non-paper components together. Nevertheless, they are a beautiful way to have flowers that will never wilt! These are much more labor intensive than kusudamas, and I have not made them very recently. Nonetheless, I feel like a page on origami would not be complete without them!