Versailles Kusudama

I did not realize how bad my flash was against the black laptop.. Sorry.

My coworker was leaving us for another job so I thought I would make her a little something I found online as a goodbye gift. I settled on the Versaille Kusudama. I liked the fact that the pieces are simple to make and didn't require glue. The no glue required was a big thing with me. In my kusudama days, almost all of my pretty flowery kusudamas requires glue to be attached to each other. So  it was good to find some pattern that is flowery but doesn't require glue.

One piece of square folded and curled with a paper clip

The pattern requires 60 pieces of squares. I used two sheets of letter sized paper, making 30 squares on each sheet. If I remembered correctly, the squares are 4.3cm x 4.3cm. It takes 5 pieces of squares to make 1 rose, and it takes 12 roses to make a full kusudama. The end result is about the size of a baseball, albeit a little smaller.

5 pieces of folded square

The pieces was easy to make, I managed to remember after making a couple of pieces. I couldn't wait to put it together. For my coworker's kusudama, I used a toothpick to curl it up. I find that curled it up fine, but it was not tight enough. For my own, I used a paper clip and that created a better curl.

One rose

When I put it together, I was afraid because of how loose the curl was, the kusudama would not hold together well. But I surprised that once half of it was put together, the ball was pretty sturdy. To put it all together was not hard, you just have to nifty with a toothpick or a paper clip to stick into the curls so they roll together. But that is because I am making it with such a small sized squares and I only needed to do that with the last few roses.


This is definitely an easy introductory kusudama. Especially with the no glue, this would be easy to clean up. It could probably be a kids project as well, just increase the size of the paper so it would be easy for them to work with.