Every Day Is Special: cranes

Showing posts with label cranes. Show all posts

January 1 - The Start of Something Crane

Posted on January 1, 2020

Cristian Marianciuc is a Romanian artist. His favorite medium is paper - you know, folding paper, cutting paper, manipulating paper.

Marianciuc was living and studying in Australia when he decided to learn more about Japanese culture and to give a lecture about the Japanese paper-folding art of origami. He told the true story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who folded paper cranes while battling cancer. Ancient folklore says that, if you fold 1,000 cranes, your wish will come true, but Sasaki had only folded about 600 cranes when she lost her battle with cancer.

Marianciuc told the lecture attendees that he related to this story partly because his own sister had died of cancer, and partly because he himself feels a kind of inner peace while folding paper cranes.

After he returned to Romania, Marianciuc struggled with depression. Trying to find meaning in life and to establish healthy psychological habits in his daily routine, Marianciuc made a New Year's Resolution to make a paper crane every day for 1,000 days.

On this date in 2015, Marianciuc folded his first resolution crane. He shared it to the world with his Instagram feed (his Instagram name is icarus.mid.air). The next day, he folded and shared another one. The next day, another one. And on and on. Some of the cranes are relatively simple - many are astonishingly complex and lovely. Not only does Marianciuc decorate some cranes with beautiful cut paper wings, he decorates some of his paper cranes with flowers and leaves!

By the way, Marianciuc is still going strong on the decorative crane project. I have a feeling he is not folding and posting every day, these days, but he makes new designs frequently. He must've passed 1,000 cranes a few years ago and is probably getting close to 2,000 now!

Check out this story about how his crane origami project has helped Marianciuc with his depression - and has helped other people as well!

Here is a link to Marianciuc's first simple crane and somewhat out-of-focus photo.

Compare that to some of these beautiful creations:

Also on this date:

National Z Day

Euro Day

Firstfoot Day

New Year's Day (also here and here)

Patriot and silversmith Paul Revere's birthday

Flag maker Betsy Ross's birthday

Rose Parade Day

Ellis Island Day

Global Family Day

Independence Day in Haiti

Independence Day in Sudan

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest pages on:

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

February holidays
February birthdays
Historical anniversaries in February

August 6 – Hiroshima Day and Peace Celebration

Published on August 6, 2013

It is the anniversary of a simply dreadful, awful, terrible event.

In Hiroshima, Japan, a city where more than 140,000 people died from one bomb dropped on this date in 1945 (counting those who died with a year from radiation), people honor and remember the dead and renew their commitment to peace. Some people call for the destruction of all nuclear weapons, everywhere, so that this horrible event never happens again.

Of course, it did happen again—just three days later, on August 9, 1945, another atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. But peace activists hope that NEVER AGAIN means from 1946 on. So far, so good; despite the fact that many more nations now have nuclear weapons, nobody has ever used them since the close of World War II.

It goes without saying that all kinds of bombings and attacks, battles and wars, especially those that kill or injure civilians, including children (and many of them do) are horrible. I have read some arguments that the nuclear bombs, as deadly as they were, probably saved lives over all—because the “firebombs” that had been used before were also killing hundreds of thousands of people—even as many as 100,000 people in a single night!

Make an origami peace crane.

Read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.

Art Club Blog has some photos of origami peace crane chains. I have seen some of these chains on gravestones and peace memorials. They are beautiful and touching.

Kids from all over the world send
thousand-crane chains to the
Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima.

Close up of thousand-crane
chains in the boxes seen here,
left, at the Peace Monument.

Also on this date:

Author Alfred, Lord Tennyson's birthday

Artist Andy Warhol's birthday

Independence Day in Bolivia and Jamaica

Plan ahead:

Here are my Pinterest pages on August holidays, historical anniversaries in August, and August birthdays.

And here are my Pinterest pages on September holidays, historical anniversaries in September, and September birthdays.

November 11, 2012 - Origami Day

The famous Japanese folding-paper art of origami got its start in the1600s (or earlier) and became popular worldwide by the mid-1900s. Note that origami traditionally doesn't include any cutting or gluing—that would be kirigami. Origami is just folding.

Even though there are only a few basic origami folds, they can be combined to make all manner of things, from birds and flowers, to dragons and dinosaurs and elephants and castles and steamships and even starships!

There are lots of origami projects to try on the Origami Club website, which offers animations and traditional folding diagrams.

Once I went to see Manzanar, which was a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II, and I was amazed to see the hundreds or thousands of colorful origami cranes that had been threaded together to make long decorative chains that draped the gravestones. There have been many people, including artists, who have been touched by the story of Sadako and the 1000 Paper Cranes, and long chains made of origami cranes can be seen on other memorials and cemeteries and in museum displays. Check out this gathering of artists' versions of the thousand-crane theme.
Some people create amazing art pieces by just folding paper! Check out:
this crazy origami website and
this other amazing origami website,
this You Tube slideshow, and
this time-lapse video.

(I learned a lot from watching the time-lapse video. Of course, I did NOT learn how to fold an origami scorpion! (Way out of my league!) But I did learn that the artist used painted aluminum foil rather than ordinary paper, that he did a WHOLE lot of pre-folding to make creases before he started the actual folding, and that the scorpion took 3 HOURS to fold! Yikes!)