Let's start 2025 with a fun craft!! I went to a craft fair and fell in love with an origami flower ball ornament. I bought one. I knew I could make one for myself, but didn't want to take the time before Christmas, so I bought one.
Then during my break I received two packs of origami paper to review. I fell in love with Origami Paper 100 Sheets Butterfly Patterns 6" (15 cm) and looked for a tutorial to make an origami flower ball. Apparently, it is called a Kusudama flower ball.
There are many online. I found a video to watch but cannot find it again. Don't worry though because I'm going to provide a tutorial with geometry terms.
This flower ball is perfect for this pack of paper. There are exactly twelve designs in the pack and there are twelve flowers, so I made one with each design. Each flower uses five sheets, so this is 60 pages of paper. I also used full sheets of paper. The tutorials use half the size or smaller. My next one I will cut the squares into four or use smaller papers. I love the colors and prints of this paper pack. The quality is wonderful as always.
Now I always like to add geometry to my origami tutorials. I have a project I do with my geometry students where they have to make an origami tutorial using some of our geometry vocabulary.
Origami Flower Tutorial
Begin with a square piece of origami paper. Start with the back side up.
Fold it along one of the square's diagonals.
You will end up with an isosceles right triangle. The isosceles right triangle has a few special properties. An isosceles triangle has an altitude that is also a median and perpendicular bisector. We will be folding the other two medians.
Our next step is to fold one of the corners up to the vertex of the isosceles triangle. The fold made will be a median of the triangle.
Here is the median:
Now we fold the other median or bring the other corner to the vertex.
You can see the two folds create a square with the diagonal showing. You then unfold these and can see the two medians we folded. The third would divide the triangle into two congruent triangles. Note, you could also talk about the congruent triangles that are making the square. You could ask how you could prove they are congruent.
Now we are going to open the corners and flatten them into kites.
This is probably the hardest part of the project.
You want the kite to be centered. You can flip it over to see if you are centering it well.
Fold the other side into the same kite.
Now fold the upper triangle of each kite down. These folds make the other diagonals of the kites. If you unfold them, you will see that the diagonals are perpendicular.
Now fold the long isosceles triangles in half.
Now we need glue or double-sided tape. You will put the glue (or tape) on one of the folded triangles.
Now you will roll the shape and glue the two triangles together.
Now looking at the open end, you can open the folded parts to make it look different. Here they are closed.
And here they are open. Personally, I like them open since it shows the backside color.
Now you make four more of these petals. We glue them together to form the flower.
Put glue on each side of the joint and add petals to each side. Continue to form the complete pentagon. Make sure the last petal has glue on both sides!
And your first flower is complete.
If you make eleven more flowers you can create the flower ball or as I like to call it the flower dodecahedron. To make the dodecahedron, you glue the flowers together by gluing three petals from different flowers each time. Make sure to glue a string loop so you can hang your decoration!
You can compare the flower ball to a dodecahedron. You can see how three faces meet at each vertex.
I love how the origami papers look in my flower ball. The backside colors look amazing with the front side prints. I hope you will check out this great origami paper and get creating! And if you are teaching geometry consider adding some origami to the class. The kids love it!
