Origami fun with brownies no less

My world famous brownies, and by that I mean a roughly 3 block area in my neighborhood, go into recycled date containers. To cover up the label, I make a round background for origami cranes. Most of the time, the cranes are flat on the box lid, but occasionally they are fluffed up as they're supposed to be. Either way, they have elicited comment, and in the case of some kids, excitement for how they are made. Just me having fun.

It was my love of origami that inspired a project at the library where I worked in the dark ages. That building doesn't even exist any longer. But I digress. The project was to make one thousand cranes for peace, commemorating the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We held little maker space demonstrations and provided origami paper so our library patrons could add to the display and learn something at the same time. Things were going well enough, but an amazing young man took it into overdrive. He not only sat at the work table rapidly making cranes, he also convinced others to join in and instructed them in the folding process. Frankly, we had never had such enthusiasm before, so we were frankly gobsmacked and so pleased. Ah, but here's the best part. I expected we might get a couple hundred cranes made before everyone got bored and gave up. I've never been happier to be so wrong about a library program. We ended up with (take a deep breath) 1,192 cranes. 

That amount created a bit of a pickle in terms of display. Where would they go? How would we account for all of them? Then the idea light bulb went on. I had some large metal rings at home and lots of string. Why not string them up on a metal ring? But then what? Fortunately a Public Works guys said we could hang them from one of the wooden beams that ran across the building. So, after many hours of carefully stringing cranes with a needle and strong thread, we had our display. Instead of leaving it up for a short period as we usually did for displays, it remained an integral part of the decor until the building was torn down and replaced by new architecture. If you're wondering what happened to the cranes -- a teacher saw the display and asked if they could have it for their classroom. Of course the answer was a resounding yes.