I'm in love with Kusudama Balls

When I starting planning this wedding I had no idea how involved this planning process would be.  I saw lots (and lots) of things that I loved and desperately wanted to incorporate into my wedding.  Kusudama balls were just one of those many details.  Don't know what I'm talking about?  Well my original inspiration came from Miss (now Mrs) Cardigan on Weddingbee.  Here are her photos:

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I think I'm in love.  I love the simplicity of her ceremony decor and the pop of yellow is just awesome.  There's a great tutorial for making these kusudama balls here: part 1 and part 2). 

So I've recently started on this project and let me just say that as gorgeous as these little balls are, they are evil.  Pure. evil.  I didn't really consider how much time and work was going to be required of me to make enough for our ceremony site.  If we have 200 guests (the max that our site holds), that's 10 rows of 10 on each side.  One ball per end chair in the aisle means I need to make 20 of these things.  Doesn't sound too hard right?  That's what I thought, but oh how misguided I turned out to be.  Here's the sequence of events that goes into one of these little balls. 

First, I had to cut all of the paper into little squares (3x3).  Since I started with 8 1/2" x 11" that means I get 6 squares out of one sheet of paper. 

Then, you fold.

And fold (and fold, and fold, and fold)....

Then, you take each of these folded papers and glue them into petals.  I don't have a personal photo of this, but here's generally what a petal looks like:

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Then, once you've made enough petals and the glue has dried, you glue 5 of these together to make a flower.  Looks easy?  Yes, you'd be wrong again.  Getting those petals to line up perfectly... it's just... well, not easy.

Then, you do it again

And you do this until you have 12 flowers.  Yes, that's right.  If you've been doing your math along with me that means that you need 60 small pieces of paper to make 1 ball.  A little more math tells you that to make 20 balls, I will need to fold, glue, wait, glue, wait, glue, etc. with 1200 of these petals.  The enormity of this task didn't really hit me until I started making my first one last night and saw how long these steps actually take.  The things we do for 1 day.  A very special day, but 1 day nonetheless.

Once you have your 12 flowers, you start gluing them together, giving them time to dry in between. 

Until finally you have half of a Kusudama ball.

And then you make another half.  After both halves are dry (or pretty dry if you're impatient like me), you glue the ribbon or whatever you'll use to hang these to the inside and glue them together.  After this step is where I went to bed and let the glue dry overnight.

I woke up to a nice, dry, fully-put-together Kusudama Ball.  KittyBean was really interested as you can tell from the first photo. 

I'm really happy with the way it turned out.  Not too thrilled about the prospect of making another 19, but what's a girl to do?  What do you think of my first attempt?