This is an interesting blog entry. It was meant to just be a breakdown of this little art project I got going on here, but the materials I used led to plenty of introspection that I felt like writing about. It'll all make sense, I promise. Additionally, the project itself took nearly two years to complete due to various reasons, and this blog entry is kind of like the punctuation mark of all that effort. I hope this is interesting in any way to... anybody? BACKGROUND: What I've made here is called a senbazuru, which is a thousand origami cranes strung together. It's a popular project for many origami enthusiasts, but it also has some significance in Japanese culture. According to legend, a person who manages to fold a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish (or be rewarded with good luck and eternal happiness). It's also become a way to symbolize peace, sparked by the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was irradiated during the atomic bombings of 1945 and died of leukemia at age 12. While she was stuck in the hospital, she was inspired by the old legend and set to fold a thousand cranes. Despite having spent close to 15 years making origami stuff (and knowing how to make the traditional origami crane model by heart), I've never actually done this before (not up to a thousand, at least). A thousand cranes is a lot, and while time wasn't really an issue, I had no idea where I'd even display it all when I was done. I realized this problem rather quickly at age 12, when I first learned origami in art class (shoutout to Ms. Maila for kickstarting that passion). The model we were taught in that class (the traditional duck/swan) really captured my imagination for some reason, and I ended up folding literally hundreds of them obsessively both at home and in school for at least a month or so. My parents, while supportive of my new hobby, were not as receptive to me just leaving all these paper birds around the house, so I ended up just keeping them all in a Ziploc bag as to not make a mess. That bag has since been lost to time, but I still have the original swan I folded for the art class. I gotta frame this thing... Anyway, making all those swans made me realize a) it would be lame to make a thousand cranes just to keep them in a bag, and b) wait, I don't actually have that much paper to make that many cranes (the swans I were folding at the time were mostly made from scratch paper I would scavenge from random places). Thus, I ended up not bothering, and continued to fold swans just for the hell of it. My origami horizons would expand shortly after, as my dad (who, despite not talking to me about it at all, was highly observant of my interests, a trait I both appreciated and was impressed by) had a coworker of his photocopy an origami book full of new models for me to make. This is how I learned to read origami diagrams, as well as how to make Akira Yoshizawa's most iconic origami butterfly design, and how I discovered my favorite subject matter in all of origami. If you want to get into my origami butterfly obsession, my blog category Project Monarch is all about me exploring that obsession, starting with the very butterfly model that kickstarted it. The first chronological blog entry of that series will provide all the context should that be of interest to you. Simply look for Project Monarch on the blog categories list on the sidebar on the right of this page (or at the very bottom if you're on mobile). Also, that origami book photocopy my dad got for me? I still have it. It's in this clear book (which I have had for much longer). Not only is it a handy reference (I keep forgetting how to do the origami cube sometimes, for instance), it's just a nice reminder of how my dad was more than willing to encourage my silly little hobbies. This is just one of a seemingly endless list of things my dad did for me that I am eternally grateful for. After finishing Project Monarch a few years back and completing the section of my bedroom wall, I still had the itch to fold some more origami. My mind gravitated back to the senbazuru, and having managed the logistics of folding close to 60 distinct origami butterfly models, working out how to display them neatly, and even documenting the process (I have a whole folder on my computer with files on this project), I thought, I could probably do this now. I wouldn't actually begin my prep work until early of last year, however. PREPARATIONS: While I still had a good amount of paper left over from Project Monarch (plus a fuckton of scratch paper obtained from several sources over the years), I still had to figure out how to effectively use my supply. I can't just make squares out of everything I have and go from there; I highly doubt all this paper I had amounts to a thousand, as many as it may seem. So, my next thought was to make the cranes out of smaller squares. Not only is it more efficient use of the paper (I could get, say, four cranes from a single sheet), it immediately solves another issue I thought of: what if these 1000 cranes are too bloody massive to display? I debated for quite a long time on what paper to select for the project? Do I do what I did for Project Monarch and go all in on the pretty colors? Do I just pull from my pile of scratch paper and make the cranes out of those (which would result in mostly white cranes)? My mind was torn between making another colorful project and getting rid of scratch paper I had stockpiled since high school without being wasteful. This was probably a stupid thing to be conflicted about, and yet it made me put off starting the damn project. One day, I was looking through my drawers, and that's where a bizarre sense of inspiration struck. For some weird reason, I had kept every filler notebook I used for every subject I took in college instead of immediately throwing them out. Maybe a younger version of me meant to burn it all in some symbolic ritual after graduation? Hard to say. Regardless, here was the metal box, and look, it's a lot of paper! I went and counted 29 filler notebooks, each with 18 leaves (including the covers; I wanted to use those as well since they'd add splashes of color to a predominantly white color scheme). I intended to make squares out of each of those leaves, which I'd then divide into four smaller squares to make the actual cranes with. Some quick math showed that I had way more than enough to make a thousand cranes if I did this (more than double, in fact). I then took the time to carefully dismantle the bindings of each filler so I can cleanly tear the paper (tearing a page straight out results in an unusable disaster). Some were stapled in, while others were bound with string, but both were removed easily with one of dad's old darts (he would be quite annoyed at how frequently I use his old stuff as improvised tools). I then prepared one of the blank pages and made a crane out of the resulting small square to see how it would size up. I was satisfied with the scale of the test crane, so I proceeded with the rest of the preparations. I didn't start making the cranes just yet; that'll be described in its own part later. In addition to my notes, I also dug through my comically large envelope of scratch paper for stuff that was also from college. I felt that since I was going through a whole nostalgia run anyway, I thought it'd be fun to add more variety and include these to the stack of paper I was planning to use. This was quite a productive (and messy) search, as I found all sorts of paper from across the years. It's quite the assortment, so here's a list of stuff that eventually became paper cranes (this is not exhaustive):
Next, I needed a needle and some string to connect the cranes. Thankfully, my mom's got a sewing kit. No problem there. The bigger problem is making sure the cranes don't slide out of the thread once I've strung them together. I looked up pictures of senbazuru other people have made and saw that they'd put beads at the bottom of the thread so that the bottom crane will sit there and not fall off. I probably could have just gone to the store to buy beads somewhere, but I felt adamant to only use materials in the house. I did some digging around the house and found a rather sacrilegious solution. Somewhere in my chest of random garbage was a broken rosary. Rosaries are made of beads. You understand where I'm going with this. All that's left is a place to tie all the finished strings of cranes to. I paced my room a lot trying to come up with a solution here. My first idea was to use some leftover bamboo from a high school project (might have been from the big English Week play in 4th year; why the fuck did I take extra bamboo home?!), but this idea immediately fell apart because we apparently have the worst fucking hacksaw in the observable universe, and that made what would be the most basic of woodworking an absolute goddamn nightmare. I started scavenging the back of the house (which is filled with assorted bullshit) for possible things to use. Stuff like old curtain rods and random metal brackets were too long, and since they were metal, I couldn't cut them down to size. I also considered using hangers, but I decided against it after visualizing how stupid it would look on my wall. Ultimately, I took too long trying to figure out what I wanted to do here, so I decided to just worry about the display solution later. FOLDING THE CRANES: I had all the materials and I knew what to do, so it was time to start making cranes. The folding itself isn't anything special; I've been folding cranes on autopilot since I was 12, so it's nothing really worth elaborating on. I guess the only thing worth saying here is that if you're going to learn origami, start by learning the crane. It's actually not the easiest model you can learn, but it teaches you a lot of important folding techniques. Here are some instructions if you want to try. What made folding the cranes interesting was the paper I was using to make them. It's all notes from my college years. Before I removed the bindings from the fillers, I'd look at each cover and see the subject names, and before I prepared the individual sheets into squares, I'd skim the notes I had written. So many memories came flooding back, and I felt compelled to write about some of it here. For organization's sake, all that waxing nostalgic will be in the back half of this blog entry; if you only care about the creation aspect of the senbazuru, don't worry, I'll resolve that here so you don't have to read through any of my reminiscing if you don't want to. Here are some steps I took as I went about making the cranes, plus some amusing observations as I skimmed through my notes and other assorted papers:
A thousand cranes is a lot. Just saying a number doesn't really help anybody comprehend the scale something, so prior to assembly, I took a picture of all 1000 finished cranes in boxes. Like I said earlier, I can fold cranes with zero issue, so if I did the math, it probably wouldn't have taken more than a few hours for me to make all this if I did it all in one go. Of course, I elected not to do that and just made what I could on a given day. When I started this project nearly two years ago, I tried to make a habit of folding a bunch every morning before I got around to whatever I had to do. However, a combination of various responsibilities and a desire to pursue my other hobbies (which includes maintaining this blog) would affect my output, so there would be times when I'd only make the bare minimum. There were also significant stretches of time when I was in serious emotional distress, which left me with zero motivation to work on anything. This led to entire months when I wouldn't make cranes at all, though the fact that my work was sitting unfinished across from my bed eventually compelled me to get back to it, only for the cycle to repeat itself. I don't think this would have taken this long if I had just worked on it with regularity, but in any case, I'm glad that I actually finished it in the end. ASSEMBLY: After lots and lots of folding, it was time to string the cranes together. I spent an unreasonable time thinking about how I wanted to go about this. Do I want 20 strings holding 50 cranes each? Or would 25 strings with 40 cranes be better? I settled for the former, as I thought that struck a reasonable balance of length (I didn't want the cranes to go so far that they touch the floor) and width (I wanted to give each string enough space so they don't get tangled). Also, this exercise inadvertently led to an exploration of the many factors of the number 1000. I made what can be described as an absurd effort in selecting which individual cranes get grouped together on a single string. First, I wanted to make sure that the colored cranes (folded from the filler covers) are somewhat equally distributed, such that there wouldn't be a weird imbalance of colors when looking at the entire thing. This was a little tricky, since the colored cranes were only a mere fraction of the total, and the overall palette was not that varied. As for the actual configuration of the cranes on each string, I just played it by eye and tried to make sure different strings didn't have a pattern of colors that was too similar to each other. I considered organizing the cranes on each string per category (like the subjects I took in each semester), but with a literal thousand to keep track of, I decided against giving myself a headache over a detail that not even I could appreciate just by looking at the thing. I think the very fact that it's all made from paper I used in college held enough meaning, and it's something that can be noticed by any observer looking close enough. The actual threading is nothing much to write about. Prepare the correct length of string (this took an embarrassing amount of tries to approximate), run it through the needle, tie a knot at the end, and put a bead on the knot. Then you just jab the needle through the cranes' bodies until you've got the right amount. Once that's done, cut the needle free, tie a loop at the free end, and repeat several more times until all 1000 cranes are strung together. I'm pretty terrible at sewing, but thankfully the only skill I really needed for this project was tying a proper knot on the thread (which is probably the one thing in sewing I can consistently do right). Once everything was assembled, it was time to find a place to put it on. I thought about putting it as a decoration for my bedroom door, but then I wouldn't be able to see it. I really wanted to place it on the same wall where the origami butterflies were, but the space available was quite limited given there's also a huge window on that wall. I went back to stressing out about how to display each string of cranes while also not getting in the way of my curtains, and I went through a whole gamut of stupid ideas that involved using all sorts of shit from around the house. Eventually, I settled on using a length of rope I had lying around, which I could tie to the mounts that connect my curtains to the wall. Overall, this was a rewarding albeit involved project. The actual folding of the 1000 cranes will sound like a chore, but since I didn't really do all the folding in one go, making the cranes ended up more of a fun break between important tasks or a nice way to kill time in the evening. The real tedium was in the initial setup, as the whole preparation of the paper was a mindless sequence of unbinding fillers and cutting squares out of the pages. I also made it needlessly complicated by selecting which pages I wanted, but looking through those notes and recalling memories was part of what made my spin on the senbazuru a personal experience. The entire thing itself is symbolic because of all the paper I used; it's like a whole chapter of my life in origami form, though it doesn't really tell the complete story. I'll probably make another one of these, but it won't be in the near future. There's definitely room for improvement with my final product here, as I kind of just let the cranes do their own thing as opposed to making everything neat (like adding spacers between cranes, aligning everything to face the same direction, etc.). I also want to be more lenient (and colorful) with my paper choice, as well as experiment with other display methods (like a ceiling fixture, or something more unorthodox like placing everything in a fancy shadowbox). POSTSCRIPT:
You don't have to read this part. I assume you're just here for the thing I made, and you're curious about how I made it. I just felt like I had to write this given that there are strong memories of an entire chapter of my life woven deep into the very cranes that I made. College was... a tumultuous time for me. In all honesty, there's so much in there that I'm not ready to talk about, though I've touched upon it somewhere else on this blog. I'm not going through a whole timeline here; that would make this blog entry way too long, and it would all merit its own blog entry anyhow (though I currently have zero interest in writing that). I'm just going to focus on the specific memories that resurfaced because of the paper I used for this project. When I first started skimming through my notes for this project, my brain's first instinct was to recall the actual subject matter I was reading. My success rate here was hit or miss; I still recall topics that I have next to zero use for in everyday life (like Boolean algebra or basic matrix operations) disturbingly well, but this exercise also caused me to question how I got through some of these classes (I drew a complete blank on organic chemistry, for instance). It was kind of fun to try to remember as much as I can, and while I only use a fraction of the stuff I learned these days, I still think it's quite the privilege to have been granted an opportunity to learn all of that (even if some of the subjects frustrated me). The natural progression was to remember the experiences of the subjects themselves. Some classes were certainly more remarkable than others, but for the most part, I could remember how much or how little I was engaged by the subject matter, whether or not it was a subject I struggled with, and how well each respective professor held my attention. This would also lead into specific memories for certain classes, like a few times when I fell asleep (please don't judge me; I was struggling with my sleep in general at the time), some funny moment involving my classmates, or big projects I'd had to work on. The feelings associated with these memories are a mixed bag; I remember just as many boring classes or frustrating professors as I do really fun ones, and remembering the classes I failed honestly made me feel like shit all over again. Even the doodles I drew during classes told a story. Granted, most of them are nonsense (like me practicing my signature for no reason), but more than a few were near-perfect preservations of what else I was thinking about during those days. Some doodles were of superheroes (which revealed what movie I was excited for at the time), others were from games I was thinking about playing after class, and a few were me revisiting silly drawings from when I was much younger. It's kind of amusing to look back and see where my mind used to wander during these days, and looking through my work reaffirms that drawing is definitely not in my wheelhouse. At some point, I found myself reminiscing about pretty much everything. I thought about all the friends I've made (and all the fun times we had inside and outside campus), little things like having lunch at the nearest mall or spending long gaps between classes loitering in the hallways, terribly long commutes home thanks to awful traffic, the utter misery of a rainy day flooding the streets of Manila, the prevalence of student activism in the university, having my trusty iPad and 3DS with me to keep me and my friends occupied, and so much more. I could even recall what music I was listening to the most during specific years, what games I was playing at the time, and what kind of comics I was exploring. These memories are as bittersweet as anything from a time long past. Yeah, it's sad to think about the things I miss from those times, but many of the memories are fun to revisit, and if I felt so inclined, I could revisit the actual places and talk about it with my friends for that fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. But the thing about my time in college is that it was far from the typical mix of good and bad that any other past era of my life would be. Looking through all my notes and all this paper reaffirmed the one thing I knew for damn sure: these were the years when I was at my lowest point. It was unavoidable for me to eventually remember every shitty feeling I felt throughout my time in college, and how those feelings still bleed out and adversely affect my life in ways that I really need to (and am trying to) resolve. Every failure that eroded my self-esteem, the combined weight of outside pressure and my own guilt and shame, the utter isolation I felt as I shut myself off and dared to face everything alone due to my inability to trust, the grief of a shocking loss that brought me to a point lower than I thought possible at the time, and all the relationships I compromised because I wasn't strong or mature enough to process everything I was going through... I remembered all of it. It doesn't feel great to remember any single one of those things, let alone all of them. Now, one would think the fact that I used paper that essentially caused me to relive legitimate trauma is why it took me nearly two years to complete this. It's not an unreasonable conclusion to make, I suppose. While remembering all this certainly didn't help, the emotional distress I was describing earlier involved more specific circumstances during the time I was working on this. I'd rather not talk about any of that at all, but I can't deny that what I was dealing with at the time and the awful memories I recalled because of this project are connected. In fact, I would say that my choice of material for the cranes is what pushed me to complete it in the end. Contrary to what some may believe, I don't enjoy being fucking miserable, and at some point during the making of this project, I realized that this senbazuru could be something more than just me cleverly reusing paper. It dawned on me that I was taking something from a time I don't fondly look back on and making something I love out of it, and I wondered if that act meant something. Is it stupid to think that I could symbolically move forward by turning paper I used during a low point in my life into a fucking art project, like it would somehow undo every mistake I made then? Probably, but looking at the end result hanging on the wall right now, I actually feel slightly less terrible about it all. I stare at these cranes and see it as proof that I persevered through a purgatory I fully believed I didn't deserve to escape, and I think that's something. It's not quite the feeling of closure I really wish graduation would have given me, and it's certainly not proof that I've redeemed myself in any way, but I'll take what little solace I can get. If, for some bizarre reason, you've actually read this far, I hope that I've properly expressed how this collection of cranes (that, I will stress, anybody can make; what I've done here is not that ambitious in origami terms) is more than just that to me. When I make things, my driving force is usually the desire to see an idea realized, and this is one of the incredibly rare times when my motivation was much more than that. - end -
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June 2024
Derryck
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