Kusudama

From Wikipedia:

The Japanese kusudama (薬玉; lit. medicine ball) is a paper model that is usually (although not always) created by sewing multiple identical pyramidal units (usually stylized flowers folded from square paper) together through their points to form a spherical shape. Alternately the individual components may be glued together.

One day in the library, my friend and I were looking up random videos on youtube and for no apparent reason we started watching origami tutorials. We happened to come across some kusudama videos. They looked pretty cool, but I wasn't entirely impressed by them at first. My friend decided to make one for his girlfriend and all my other friends said that it had outdone anything that I have ever made. I didn't tell them, but I took a little offense to it. At the end of the semester I came across an entire shelf of different types of origami papers at Daiso, so I picked up some random ones and decided to make a kusudama myself using a youtube tutorial. It took me a LOT longer to make it than I thought.

The video said you could either make 5 petal flowers all the way around and it would require 60 units or modules or whatever. But then it also showed a larger and better looking version where each 5 petal flower is surrounded by a 6 petal flower. I wanted to make that one! It ended up taking 91 modules.

Here's when I first started making the modules. I was using pink, yellow, and green flower patterned paper from Daiso. As you can see here I already have about 5 modules done on the left. I made some practice ones just to make sure I knew how to do it on the right using some post-it note size origami paper.

I actually didn't know how many modules it would take total and each pack of paper came with 60 sheets, so I started putting the kusudama together after I made the first 60 modules. I tried my best the alternate colors, but with flowers having an odd number of petals it was really difficult to do. Each little nub sticking out of each module attached to another module. It was sooo tedious!

Here's the result! Look it's my christmas tree! As you can see, each 5 petal flower is attached to a 6 petal flower. I spent 1-5 minutes on each module (depending on what I was doing at the same time), out of 91 modules, so that's a few hours total. And then it just took hours to put it all together. Doing a little bit every other day, I spent like 2 weeks putting it together haha, I guess I'm just lazy. It looks flippin sweet though!

I don't want to embed the tutorial video because it's not really important, but here's the link if anyone's interested in learning how to make it themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV1R3OJOvvk