The Origami Forum

Hi, I'm new to the forum... but not that new to origami, although I am not "advanced".. heh. I'm posting because I am going to be doing an interactive art piece (for my new concepts class) involving me folding 1000 origami cranes. There is quite a bit to it and it will also involve a website, so I don't want to get into the details right now.

Anyway... I am curious for those of you who have folded 1000 cranes how long did it take you? I will have approx. 2 weeks to fold them all but I will have some help from my husband.

I'm also looking for some info on the history of origami cranes and the such so anything anyone can direct my way would be great.

And just for the fun of it I will tell you all my sad little origami secret. My favorite fold is this little bird! It's such a simple fold but I LOVE them so much. Hahaha... sad I know.

I've never tried it myself, but I don't think you could make more than 10 cranes in an hour. So that's 100 hours. If you're prepared to put in 50 hour weeks, then that's 2 weeks...

If you're using normal sized paper (eg between 5 to 30 cm), it's possible to reach a rate of one crane/minute, or even 2 cranes/minute. This works out to 20-30 hours of folding, so it's doable in one weekend. The problem is when boredom sets in...

Remember that It gets faster once you've done a few hundred or so. I've seen someone do a crane from 3 inch paper in 10 seconds. The trick is to leave out the unnecessary precreasing steps, eg the preliminary base precreases, the reverse fold precreases. These can take up quite a bit of time.

As for history, a search would probably turn up a lot of information on the Sadako story; David Lister's article is one of the most comprehensive ones on this topic. Beyond that however, there seems to be hardly any information about the earlier history of the crane. The Hiden Senbazuru Orikata, supposedly one of the oldest known origami books, deals with multiply connected cranes:

http://www.origami.gr.jp/Model/Senbazuru/index-e.html

Hey, and no shame in loving simple folds - look around some of the other messages in this forum, and you'll find that a lot of folks lean towards simple and elegant folds such as these!