Origami Interlude: Tiny Paper Cranes

If you've ordered any beading kits from my website in the past couple of months, you might have noticed something special included in your shipment.

These tiny little paper cranes came about from a minor conundrum I faced a little while back...

What to do with leftover washi? 

As I previously mentioned, I hand-fold custom masu boxes for each piece of jewelry that I sell in my Etsy shop, and I cut the paper for these boxes from large (about 24" by 36") sheets of washi. I usually have a little bit of scrap paper leftover after cutting the washi into 6-inch squares for the boxes. It isn't much paper; usually strips measuring one to two inches by 6 inches, but since washi is so beautiful (and expensive), I can't bring myself to just throw the scraps out. Here's a sampling of them, after I cut them into 1 1/2-inch squares:


But the question was; what to do with these tiny pieces of paper?

The answer: tiny paper cranes!

I do origami the way that many other beaders knit: it's not my primary art form, but I enjoy it in my non-beading time and at this point the process of folding a paper crane is nearly subconscious. I've been known to fold paper cranes out of everything from dinner napkins to those tiny tags on the ends of teabags. So, when I sat that stack of scrap washi paper next to my computer, before I knew it I had a pile of tiny paper cranes. Here are a couple of them with a quarter (left) and a 100-yen coin (right).


Here they are posing with a small Plum Egg beaded bead:


Lounging around with a Fiberoptic Dodecahedron Pendant:


And swimming in a new, as-yet-unnamed design with rizos and rivolis (a "rizoli" design?):


Finally, just to give you an idea of how many I've folded, here's just a sampling of the pile of paper cranes:

If you'd like to fold your own paper crane, this site is a great place to learn how. They're pretty easy to fold, but if it's your first time folding a paper crane, I recommend starting with a larger sheet of paper such as a 6-inch or 8-inch square. Check out some of my previous interludes into paper origami here, here, here, here, here, and here.