Ashley's Dandelion Wishes: Paper Sphere Guest Post From The Crafty Blog Stalker

Hello everyone! Remember me?!

My name is Katie and I blog over at The Crafty Blog Stalker.

Ashley is a very dear friend and has allowed me to share ANOTHER of my fun projects with you.

Have you seen these Paper Spheres? I recently saw one at a woman's show and thought it was absolutely amazing. It was made out of plastic not paper and was actually a lamp! But when I saw the price my jaw hit the floor. The largest one was $100!

A couple days ago I was Pinterest and I found this.

I was so excited that Instructables offered a tutorial. I had a hard time opening their template but I did find another pdf download template that I could open.

I printed out the template and then traced it onto chipboard so I could easily use it over and over again, and chose my Designer Series Paper (sorry guys, this one is retired but I am sure any of the current papers would look FABULOUS!)

Traced and cut out by hand 25 shapes

I immediately started trying to assemble and it really is like a great big jigsaw puzzle. I tried for what felt like 3 days (but in all reality was about an hour) to put this THING together. I was getting very, VERY frustrated because I couldn't get it to work and I thought I was following the tutorial but it still wasn't working. So I got up and walked away.

I let it sit for a couple days and then sat down to try again. It still took me a while to figure it out but I got it! YAY! So while Instructable's tutorial is great I am going to add a couple tidbits so hopefully you wont get as frustrated as I did.

Just a warning: This is a difficult project. I will try to answer questions where I can but it really just takes playing with it and figuring out how it all goes together.

Following the tutorial I made my base. (I actually did mine in two sides and then connected them together instead of building from the bottom up).

Outside

Inside

Holding the base on my lap I put the next row around the base. I did that to both bases.

looking in

Now this is where it gets a little confusing. If you look at the pieces you will see that each side of the piece slopes in a different direction. For the first several steps assemble all the pieces going the same way. The next row you are going to want to turn the pieces over so they slope in the opposite direction and assemble the next row. In the next picture I tried to show you the direction of the pieces by using these signs < > as the direction of the piece. Only do this to one base because this is the center most row.