Supposedly, little shoots of “lucky bamboo”, Dracaena braunii, will bring you luck and happiness if you have them in your home. Six stalks of bamboo should attract prosperity and wealth. Even if the paper version does not bring me luck or prosperity, it’s a beautiful little decoration to have around. Even better for those of us without a green thumb, it’s a lot more difficult to kill these by underwatering!

In fact, this lucky bamboo hates water, making it perfect for the dry Colorado winter. While I was building this model, the last page got wet and needed to be reprinted.

The folding for this model was not the most exciting among papercraft. It takes focus to make cylinders look evenly rounded without bulging bits or sharp folds. However, this model wouldn’t be shaped as delicately as small pieces will. I ended up carefully pre-rolling the cylinders in increasingly tight circles to get them to stay close to the final size and curvature. This shaping means that I don’t need to rely entirely on glue to keep the model in the right shape; relying on glue alone puts a fair bit of tension on that glue point and can bring failures at worst and a difficult gluing at best.

The ongoing difficulty with this model is the leaves. The base of those leaves is an open cylinder. It’s really tough to glue the end of an open cylinder to the side of another cylinder. Not much paper contact between the two surfaces meant lots of glue and lots of re-gluing (again and again and again) as things fell off.

This model was started Dec. 11 and finished Dec. 20. My pin for this model is available here: http://pin.it/jwT2bPo Unfortunately, the link to the model itself appears to be down and I can’t find a correct link at the moment. I’ll update this post when I find a working download link.