1000 Wedding Cranes

At long last, my 1000 crane project has come to completion. It’s been a long adventure, and I’m glad it’s finally done.

The whole thing started when my fiancée, innocently enough, mentioned the 1000 cranes wedding tradition. Naturally, being the caring person I am, I agreed to the task. Funny enough, this wasn’t his idea but something his cousin mentioned, but at least we’ll be starting our marriage with him already owing me for the rest of our life for this.

Making the cranes didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought it would be. I had a lot of help from my friends and family, which was good, because with the whole planning the wedding thing I wouldn’t have had time to make all the cranes by myself.

The original plan was to make 500 blue cranes and 500 white cranes, and hang them from an arch. An idea that was inspired by a post I saw on the Flirty Guide. (By the way, I stumbled across their blog today which had a nice guide on how to hang the little guys, in case anyone is interested).

While the original plan was to create an archway to hang the cranes, towards the end of the folding I realized that this was something that I’d want to keep for a while. I had put so much effort into the folding (as had my friends and family), and hanging them meant that we’d have to find somewhere to keep an arch full of hanging paper birds. So the plan was revised.

After much debate, we decided that the best way to keep the cranes nice for years to come would be to frame them in a shadow box. We toyed with different ideas on how to do this, and eventually came up with creating a series of three pictures, two cranes flying into each others arms and a heart.

My fiancée, being an amazing artist, sketched the outlines and I set to work filing them in. The cranes are held down with hot glue, and are overlapped to ensure that there was no gaps. Since we didn’t decide to create framed art until the last-minute, we only had the two colors to work with. Therefore, a black outline was left around each of the cranes to make sure that the outline was apparent. The heart (not shown) is blue with a white background. I created that one last, and its much thicker than the other two because it had to fit in all the remaining cranes.

All the gluing and layout took about four days to complete. I’m really pleased with the result, and I think these will look amazing hanging in our apartment following the wedding.

Now all that’s left to do is figure out how we will be displaying the art at the wedding. Wish me luck!

Something Old, Something New, Something Knitted, Something Blue

Today, while working on knitting socks, I was chatting with my maid of honor about my upcoming wedding. Eventually we got to the topic of wedding dresses, and in my sleep deprived state I had the brilliant idea of knitting my wedding dress.

After a quick internet search, I realized that the idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. I not only found a pattern to knit a wedding dress (that actually looks pretty good from the picture), a veil, and two different garters. Side note, but I really like how both of the garters have blue accents, it makes them so cute. Since blue is my favorite color, I’m really enjoying the creative ways to get the “something blue” in.

My internet search also gave me the amazing idea of having the entire wedding knitted! Just think of how pleased my guests will be when they show up and find that all the food is inedible. *evil laughter*

Of course, I could always crochet everything for the wedding. While I couldn’t find a crochet wedding dress pattern, there appears to be far more patterns out there for crocheters than for knitters. Interesting.

Too bad my wedding isn’t in five years, this could have been truly epic. Perhaps my excitement over this crazy idea is a sign that I need more sleep. Or more coffee. I’ll go with the more coffee. To the kitchen!