My 1st Design Project

My first design project is as follows. "Design a place for a leaf of your choosing. This place should embody inherent qualities of the leaf: form, shape color, texture, mass, symbolic content, etc. Paper is the only material you may use in creating this place: joints, connections, and spatial enclosure must be accomplished by manipulation of paper alone. The choice of paper(s) is yours." Trust me when I say that this assignment is proving to be a lot harder than it sounds.

Below is the very first model that I brought to class

This model was the result of a train of thought that followed a failed late night experiment trying to do paper-mache with only tissue paper and water. (The reasoning was that the water would evaporate and therefore not break the rules of the assignment.) As demonstrated in my pictures below, the tissue paper refused to stay together.

At any rate, that idea was abandoned for the purple and red model pictured above. After receiving my first in class critique, I came up with the model below -
However, I think that it's too literal and am going to continue to work on it.