Kaleidoscope of Kabuto
Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 10:46PM 
After countless folds and creases, I finally finished this custom order. Despite being tedious (I never want to see foil paper again!), this was a really fun project and I am absolutely thrilled with how it came out. The challenge was to make fifty unique origami kabuto and hakama. The outfits are made from various chiyogami papers (a great excuse to use some of the smaller sheets I had lying around) with matching foil helmets for a card-maker. After the outfits were finished and assembled, I had to attach the little helmets to each. After they were finished, they had to lie inside of a book overnight to make sure the creases stayed crisp and the model remained flat. When all fifty were done, I spread them over my kitchen table to admire my work. They looked like a crazy kaleidoscope of color and pattern glimmering in the afternoon sun! I was almost a little sad to ship them off. They would have made beautiful bookmarks or magnets to decorate my own fridge! I was considering making some more and selling them in sets of five for those interested in using them for similar projects.
The kabuto are very easy to fold if you would like to give it a try. Here is the easy version I used because I was using small paper, and here is a slightly more complicated version that looks gorgeous with double-sided paper. If doing the project with kids, you can make big ones with newspaper to wear!
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Reader Comments (2)
These look great!! Wondering what they were going to do with them?? Would make great favors at a themed party.
Kat: I didn't think of that, but favors would be so cute! I think she is a card-maker and wanted them to put on some of her card designs. But I could see them as useful for so many other things! I think it would look really cool to get about 25 of them and frame/mat them in a 5x5 arrangement of different colors. How cool would that look on your wall?