Kusudama Book Paper Sunburst – MTW Main Challenge September 2020

Well I’m sure you can imagine how excited I was for this challenge lol.  I love me some book paper, pages, books, anything at all, the only problem was, what to make?  So many ideas were coursing through my head and I just couldn’t decide.  In the end I decided to go 3D and make some home decor which is now hanging up in my studio.  I’m really trying to make things that are useful so they don’t end up in a box so why not make something I can display on my studio wall (AKA the spare room!)  Sooooo, with that in mind, here’s what I made.

When I was a kid, I liked reading, collecting fossils and folding paper (origami) and no one wanted to play with me haha just kidding.  I don’t remember how it started but I do remember being obsessed with origami and having a couple of paperback books on techniques. I wish I still had those books… I wonder what happened to them?  So when I was thinking about the book paper challenge, I started thinking about folding paper.

These little flowers are called Kusudama, which means medicine ball, and they are made from multiple pyramid shaped pieces of folded paper squares.  I’m not sure how many I made in the end but it was well over 60 at least.

These are made from plain book pages but I also stained some with coffee to add some variety.

So as I was making my little Kusudama flowers, I was wondering what to do with them and then thought about making something to hang on the wall.  I had just been commenting on some of our current mini challenge entries where the word inspiration was Sun, so I guess maybe this was in my head still, and I started thinking about a sunburst made from book pages.  I’ve seen these made with a mirror or a clock inset in the centre but I decided that I wanted the centre to be made from the Kusudama flowers.

The sunburst is made from rolled up book pages so at least that was easy peasy.

I stained some of the pages with coffee again and started placing them in my embroidery hoops to work out spacing and where I wanted coffee stained colours.  I ended up rolling about 100 of these but I didn’t use them all in the end, and I saved them to use in another project coming up next week.

After gluing all the paper rolls into position, I added my Kusudama flowers to the centre, with the final touch being the coffee coloured flower in the centre.
And here it is hanging up on my studio wall…

As always, you can enter any new project except ATCs, cards, postcards or tags (save those for the Mini Challenge!)  and there are eight prizes up for grabs!  Visit the blog for more details of prizes and sponsors and some amazing inspiration from the Design Team.