Take a square piece of paper. Fold it into a triangle, then a diamond, then a kite, then a mushed kite, then another diamond, fold it again, twist, flip, turn and finesses. Hey presto! You’ve got yourself a paper crane.
How do I know this? For the past few months I have been folding origami paper cranes. My goal is to get to 1000. An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane, such as long life or recovery from illness or injury. I intend to wish for good health for a friend of mine who is enduring a course of chemotherapy – and not for the first time in her life.
Before I continue I must give credit to my sister. Without her help I would still be around the 500 mark, cursing myself for having decided to do this. Our apartment has become a paper crane making factory. The coffee table is littered with hundreds of pieces of origami paper in green, orange and yellow. We first put the completed cranes in a salad bowl, and when that overflowed we put them in a tub.
Now I’m pretty good at maths, so soon after I started I realised that if I was going to finish this project anytime this year I would have to make more than one crane a day. I aimed for roughly 10 cranes a day, which I’ve pretty much exceeded as I got hooked on the TV show Revenge – turns out origami and TV watching complement each other nicely.
I’m getting to a point where I can fold cranes in my sleep. I usually take a stash of paper with me wherever I go. I have folded cranes on the train, in church, over coffee, at work and on the walk TO work (making the best use of idle hands during my 4 minute commute).
Some of you might be aware of the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was two years old when she was exposed to radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II. Sasaki soon developed leukaemia and, at age 12, inspired by the Senbazuru legend, began making origami cranes with the goal of making one thousand. In the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, she folded only 644 before her death; in her honour, her friends completed the rest and buried them all with her. There is a statue of Sadako at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and to this day people leave strings of Senbazuru (1000 cranes threaded together).
When I finish I will likely make a senbazuru. I’ve also considered gifting them in a large jar/vase, or even framing them. I know it is not something that you can keep forever – they’d fade and look pretty shabby after a while.* I just hope that my gift conveys the message of “get well soon”!
* At the Peace Museum in Hiroshima they make recycled paper out of the thousands of cranes that are left at the foot of the Sadako statue.
These beautiful images were sourced from http://www.favim.com/ and http://www.flickr.com/
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