Weddingbee Blog

Remember these two posts where I talked about our aisle decor? Those cute, innocent looking Kusudama balls? Yeah, they’re evil. They totally made me their bitch.

Let’s start from the beginning: it was a normal Saturday afternoon and I was working on homework, when suddenly the crafting bug bit me. In the middle of my homework – inconvenient, right? Well, we all know that you can’t ignore the crafting bug, so I begrudgingly (HAH!) set my homework aside and began to think about what I was going to do. My mind immediately went to the Kusudama balls – I knew it was too early to actually be making them, but it’s never too early for a practice run, right?

So, I grabbed some scrapbook paper that I knew wouldn’t be needed for any other projects and I set to work.

First, I got some music going:

What? I listen to Mandy Moore. Got a problem with it?

Then, I cut (and cut… and cut. 60 damn petals worth of cutting. For one flower.)

That’s a serious stack of little paper squares!

Then, I set to work folding. About an hour into the process, Mr. Cardigan looked up from his game and asked me exactly how many of these I needed to make.

“20″
“And there are how many flowers on each one?”
“12 flowers to a ball, with 5 petals in each flower.”
“So… that’s 60 petals a ball… 20 balls… you’re going to fold 1,200 freaking petals?”
“Um… guess so!”

Yeah. It didn’t hit me exactly how many of these I was going to have to do until I started working on it. Like I said – I am the Kusudama ball’s bitch. It’s official.

So, I folded

… and folded…

…and folded.

Soon, I had a nice little army of flowers sitting on my table.

Then. Oh, then. I had to put it all together. I’ll leave the full details out for the faint of heart, but let me tell you, there was cursing and yelling and maybe even a bit of crying. (Okay, so I didn’t cry. But I wanted to.) These things are HARD to put together. It’s this huge mess of flowers and you have to glue each individual petal, and your eyes start to cross, and then your head explodes.

I’m not kidding. These Kusudama balls aren’t messing around. They are eeeeeeeeevil.

After I messed around with it for a while and Mr. Cardigan was beginning to think I was going to just set the whole thing on fire, I finished it. Finally. I cackled with glee and eagerly began snapping pictures:

Please ignore the lace ribbon I used to hang it. It was all I had.

Hmm…that looks a little…off, doesn’t it? Let’s zoom in, shall we?

Uh, yeah. That totally doesn’t look right. Those flowers are very squished together. And those huge gaps! Something was very, very wrong with my Kusudama ball. In a fit of anger, I threw it across the room (actually just the table. Sorry, I exaggerate sometimes.) and began pouting. I complained to my Sister Cardy on Facebook chat, and told her that these things were from the devil. But, on the plus side, I had totally screwed it up and it still looked kind of cute, right? I mean…it didn’t look horrible. Humor me.

I was ready to give up on the oh-so-evil Kusudama ball until it was closer to the wedding. I mean, isn’t that what you are supposed to do when you run into a crafting problem – put it aside and forget about it until the last possible second? No? Just me? Well, luckily Mr. C is ever the optimist when it comes to my crafting endeavors, and he assured me that it was easily fixable. He pulled the two halves apart and urged me to try it again. So, I did. Mind you, I tried again for Mr. C – not for the Kusudama ball. I was very mad at it at that particular moment.

I pulled the tutorial back up and saw how the flower was supposed to look, which was pretty much exactly the opposite of what mine looked like. Awesome. I studied the photo for about 5 minutes and finally worked up the courage to give it another shot. And guess what? IT WORKED! Granted, it’s still not perfect, but it at least looks a little less lopsided now. See – no more squished flowers:

So, I feel like I can safely say that I conquered the Kusudama ball.

Thank God I don’t have to make another one for a few months, though, because I don’t think I could handle it. I have, however, been folding flowers like my life depends on it, and I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I’m about halfway done folding them, and I have a shoebox sitting in my room full of folded flowers:

Yeah, and that’s only half of them!

Did you have any run-ins with an evil crafting project?