1000 paper cranes...

[smeddley.livejournal.com]

...and for my wish: I wish my fingers, hands, and shoulder would stop hurting!



Originally, they were going to be 1,000 pristine, white paper cranes:



But, for one, I didn't want to waste perfectly good paper (I did make plenty using office waste paper, but it was a pain cutting around the printed bits) and two, it's actually pretty stiff paper (more on that later).

So I moved on to cutting up some magazines I get at work. These are not the best examples I took pictures of, they're just random cranes pulled out of the bunch...





Some of the stuff we get at work is closer to card stock than paper, and that worked well enough for the 3" squares:



I also cut up an old map and made some out of that:



I made a couple with some paper from my Origami-a-day calendar, but it was really, really thin paper and tore easily:



I eventually fixed that problem, learned how to deal with it, but at first it was annoying. So, despite the whole 'waste paper' bit, I did use some colored paper I had laying about:



Then I started cutting up the Oriental Trading catalog, and never looked back. By now I'd learned to deal with thin paper, and the lighter, thinner paper allowed me to fold smaller cranes. Plus, it's a really colorful catalog, and there are little pirates and duckies all over the cranes...



I also folded a crane with my eyes closed, just to see if I could



(he has Shapried wings so I'd be able to pick him out later)

And... here's another picture of a crane folded out of a 36" square piece of paper - the paper's really too floppy, you'd need much stiffer paper to fold one this big. But I had to try!



On the smaller side, I folded cranes out of 1", 1.5", 2", 2.5", and 3" squares. Here are four of those sizes (some of them are hard to tell apart, so I didn't manage to dig them all out - but this is 1" to 3")



Here's a picture of the 1" crane:



It's hard to show how tiny this thing really is - a picture doesn't do it justice. I tried a 0.5" square, but couldn't do it.

And, the big question - what do you do now that you have 1000 + cranes? Well, I'm betting they're going to make good packing peanuts...