Thursday, July 09, 2009

Crane Chandelier Project

What is the MOST exciting thing about this is that we made these cranes for ourselves, but they are going to be charitably re-purposed after our wedding. We got an email from a good friend (who is coincidentally getting married two days after we do). She knew that we were in the midst of crane-making, and stumbled upon a blog that mentioned the "Crane Chandelier Project," which is the work of a Toronto artist. The project is to collect 10,000 total cranes, from brides and grooms. The bride and groom sign the crane with their names and the date they are getting (or did get) married. For every crane that is given for the project, 50¢ is going to be donated toward cancer research. Sebastien wrote to the organization hosting the event (The Wedding Co.), and said, "Hey - I know that you are trying to get cranes, and that you usually get them one at a time - would you be willing to still donate 50¢ per crane, if we donate 800 of them?" (or some thing like that).
They said YES!, and so we are psyched! That is $400 (at least!) that we will be able to donate. I am so happy we can do this.

That's a Lot of Birds!!

I told you a couple of weeks ago that we had finished with our cranes. Last Wednesday (Canada Day), we had off from work, and we mainly stayed around the house getting things done. We wanted to begin to string the cranes, for decoration, and needed to make some sense of them, so I decided to dump all the colored cranes on our flat file, in the middle of the living room (most of them are there still....) Keep in mind that the flat file is approximately 3'x5' large.
Anyway, I emptied the multi-colored cranes from a box onto the table, and was in awe that they only make up a third of the number of paper cranes we made (it was interesting that without any planning, we had roughly equal numbers of multi-colored, large silver, and small silver cranes). I decided to pull the red ones aside, to use with some of the silver that we want to string. When I did that I thought, "I wonder how many orange cranes we have?," and so on with green and light blue, etc....

Soon enough, the table was covered in little piles of color, and it didn't take any time at all to give them a ROYGBIV-type organization. Once we said "How cool!" enough times, I realized that the center of the table was a perfect place for all the silver cranes as well (the top picture is only half of the silver ones!). You can see the results. We were pretty excited that the pictures turned out so well too.