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Writer's pictureWendy Warman

The art of Kusudama


Little did Michelle know when she spotted these sheet music flowers in a posh interior design shop in Bath that she was looking at the next project for Crafty Crew! A little light googling later and she'd discovered that the art of making them had an unusual and surprising name, kusudama aka 'medicine ball'. The name reflects the Japanese way of using this origami craft to produce a ball of flowers. Diane researched further and once again she cleverly managed to simplify the online guidance she found to demonstrate how to fold her papers into a pretty flower on Monday. Each flower requires 5 squares each folded into a cone and then glued together.Twelve flowers are needed to make a 'medicine ball'. We stuck with just one or two flowers, decorated in a number of simple ways using either the sheet music brought by Caroline, or some of Diane's stash of origami paper.

We found the origami paper was slightly easier to fold crisply into the desired shape and speculated that using full sized squares of either the origami paper or the sheet music would have made the task slightly easier. Nimble fingers were needed for our quartered origami squares to make small, delicate flowers. Diane has made hers into a lovely table centrepiece by adding leaves and stems to her flowers and placing them in a decorated tuna tin. Upcycling at its finest! This link gives you both a video and step-by-step photo guide to producing the flowers. Google 'flowers made from sheet music' and a host of other possibilities reveal themselves. The Crew are looking forward to welcoming everyone to Thursday's felted picture making. Steph has worked hard to provide lots of examples to inspire you and ensure you have a great evening!


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