Bluebells

Even though the title refers to blue, my kusudama does not have any blue in it, just different shades of purple and a little bit of green. Only the paper remake of bluebell flowers. And it has a lot of flowers, 42 of them, gather together on an Electra base and coupled with 20 tiny green buds.
I have seen a similar model on Facebook. It was way more complex than this one, called Summer Bloom and folded by Malvin Roix M. Orense. When I first say his models, I was fascinated. They are perfectly folded, complex and diverse. His first 1000 cranes set (senbazuru) were folded when he was 11 years old and he released them this April, "to tatter and dissolve, and have symbolically released his birthday wishes". May his wishes become true!

It was a nice model to fold, even though it has a lot of modules: 164 of them. The secret of this kusudama, is the Electra base, that is folded from 60 modules. The result is nicer than the one resulted from assembling 30 modules or even 90 modules. The end form is almost a perfect sphere. The assembly is 5 with 4 (12 fives, 30 fours and 20 threes).

The flowers are from the book "Hana no kusudama", written by Mariko Kubo. They are simple modular flowers, having two pieces each: one for the petals and one for the middle. I made them from pentagons, squares and triangles. Well... scratch that last part. I tried to make them from triangles, but I discovered that I was wasting a lot of paper that way, so I have decided to create a three-petal flower (the bud) from a square. This way I managed to save a lot of trees.

Each flower and bud were inserted into the space left by the base modules. It is funny that when I make this kind of origami, with flowers on a base, I am always saying that I have an Electra model, but you don't see it anywhere, or you just caught a glimpse of it if not all the corners are filled with origami. But trust me, the base is there, to sustain the model and to garantee the round shape.

The end result is amazing, so I really want to get back to folding another variant of it.

Have a great Summer day!

Base model: Electra
Designer: David Mitchell
No of pieces: 60 modules (7cm x 7cm)
Assembly: 5 with 4
Tutorial: http://cridiana-origami.blogspot.com/2012/04/tutorial-electra.html