Origami love

I just realised today that it isn’t long before Valentine’s Day will be upon us and that means I had better get making as I always try to make my husband a card rather than buy one. My favourite cards are these origami ones.

You can find all sorts of origami hearts on the internet. If you want to make them, here are links to the instructions for the blossom heart (along with some other hearts) and the crane heart . I wouldn’t use this paper again as you can see white through the creases but I liked the contrast on the reverse.

My eldest son must take after me as he gave me this origami for my birthday last year.

The instructions are for these hearts are here on ‘origami instructions’ where you can find pretty much any origami to make.

You can see one of my wedding pictures above, appropriately next to the origami hearts, because when we got married my husband and I had an origami wedding.

In Japan, Senbazuru, which means a thousand cranes, is the art of folding origami cranes and stringing them together. According to legend, the person who has the patience to fold a thousand cranes will have their wish granted. The crane is also a symbol of long life and fidelity, and cranes are given as gifts at wedding and hung in houses for luck. They are also a symbol of peace and hope, inspired by the memory of  twelve year old Sadako Sasaki who died of leukaemia ten years after the Hiroshima bombings.

So it was that, for months before we got married, every evening my future husband and I sat down and folded paper cranes together. Sometimes we chatted, sometimes we worked in silence. It was never a chore.

On the day before our wedding day, we carefully strung each crane onto fishing line and hung them from the ceiling of the reception venue

The overall effect was better than we could ever have imagined.

You can see the other origami details that we made for the wedding.

 

The bouquets were made by the whole family, making them extra special.

If you want to make an origami crane you can find the instructions here. We used printing paper for the thousand cranes to keep the cost down and nicer card and scrapbook paper for the other ones.

This post has taken me so long to write as most of the time has been spent travelling down memory lane as I looked back through the pictures, something I don’t do often enough. Now is a good time to do it because we will be packing many of these things away and leaving them here in boxes when we move to Canada.

Thank you to Rainbowjunkiecorner and Wild Daffodil for spurring me on to share my wedding photos with you after rainbowjunkiecorner’s post on origami angels.

x

 

 

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