Windmill Base Kusudama (Designed by Aditya Kumbhare)

Windmill Base Kusudama

Designed and folded by Aditya Kumbhare (Adi)

	<-- Triangular View
Pentagonal View -->

History

I made this Kusudama based on Meenakshi Mukerji's Flowered Dodecahedra Kusudamas. (source: http://www.origamee.net/creation/cr06to07.html)

For this design, Mrs. Mukerji used twelve pentagonal 'windmill bases', and 30 connecter pieces. This was the first time I had heard of the term origami windmill base, so I searched it up. I came across a few videos and resources describing how to make a windmill base. It wasn't very complicated, and I did remember using windmill bases elsewhere. 

I came up with a way to connect two windmill bases (each made of a 3x3 inch square sheet of paper) using a connector piece (1.5x1.5 inch sheet of paper), and then squash folded each 'blade' of the windmills so they wouldn't stick out and/or interfere with each other. Using this basic design, I created a cube made of 6 pink square windmill bases and twelve yellow connector pieces. 

But the pieces looked a little boring. The final product looked like a yellow cube with pink stars on each face. So, I decided to add a bit more color by inserting a small green piece (also 1.5x1.5 inches) inside the center of each windmill base. I also added a few other folds to make the final product more sturdy and nicer-looking. 

Then, an Idea hit me. If I folded each square windmill piece diagonally in half, I could assemble 30 of these pieces in an icosahedral pattern like a typical sonobe kusudama. So, I set to work.

Now for a bit of math (Don't worry, It's not that bad!)

The size of the paper that can be used isn't limited to the sizes I used! As long as the paper is square and the smaller pieces are half the length of the larger ones, it will work!

The final product would need 30 windmill pieces, 30 internal pieces, and 60 connector pieces. (An icosahedron has 30 edges and 20 triangular faces, so I need 3 connector pieces per face. 20x3=60)

Each windmill piece uses a 3x3 inch sheet of paper and each connector piece uses a 1.5x1.5 inch sheet of paper, meaning I can make 4 connector pieces out of one 3x3 sheet of paper. Same with the green internal sheets of paper.

So in total I used 53 sheets of paper, each of which was a 3x3 inch square.

Thank you for visiting my blog! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.