Happy New Year!
I wanted to drop in and share our new kusudama ornament we made for 2013, above. We used a black and white patterned origami paper I picked up from Michael’s. Below is 2012’s ornament that never got shared on the blog.
We didn’t get around to making it in time for Christmas 2012, so we went with all red colors for Valentine’s day instead.
When we made the first one in 2008 I had a vision of having a tree decorated entirely with these, but then we realized how labor intensive it is, so we just made the one, but now we have 6! Only 4 of them are small enough to actually fit on the tree, but still, it is cool to see the collection grow each year. I love this holiday tradition.
You can click on each picture above to read that year’s post.
Just some facts about the ornaments if you are interested in making one for yourself:
Paper squres (64 pieces) should be no bigger than 3″ square for a resulting 4.5″ ornament. Trust me, our first “ornament” is about 12 inches in diameter!
The instructions (if I remember correctly) say to use glue. There is no way you’d ever get this done if you were waiting for each piece of paper to glue together. The first year or two we used an adhesive tape, but that started acting funky over the years, so we have switched to glue gun and it speeds up the whole process and the pieces hold together SOLIDLY!
We follow this 2 step tutorial each year.
These are so, so pretty! I might try making one next year. For a while I was buying an angel ornament every year, but I got discouraged some years when I couldn’t find one I liked. I’m very picky about my ornaments, ha ha. I like them to be pretty, and not cute or especially “Christmasey”.