Half a Mile...and Counting!

I have recently counted 500 cranes! To mark the completion of the first half of my journey to folding 1000 paper cranes, I thought another crane post was in order.

Over time, I have folded some very strange cranes. I folded them out of everything and anything I could get my hands on, even chocolate wrappers. There have been some strange mutations indeed on Paper Moon in the past. Let us revisit some favorite crane posts: "Mutant Cranes" and "Cranes Again".

I made them in just about every size that would fit in the box under my bed.

Cranes have been my favorite things to fold since I started doing origami, and I've tried my hand at some variations before (see "Box O' Cranes").

In honor of the occasion, I made a few (many -- I actually spent way too much time on this) neat crane variations.

Let us start with some traditional variations.

Wavy-Winged Crane

Congratulations Crane

Crane Box

And then some not-so-traditional ones...

Imoseyama, or as I like to call them, Siamese Cranes.
I wonder if they count as one crane or two... 

The freaky Four-Legged Crane.
I don't know why anyone would do this, but oh well.

The Standing Crane

And the dreaded Three-Headed Crane

I am obsessed with bookmarks and have been making my own since I was very young. I recently discovered Tadashi Mori's lovely origami crane bookmarks. Here are his tsuru bookmarker tutorials for the square-based one and the triangle-based one.

Tadashi Mori's tsuru bookmark in my
Collector's Edition of the Dragon Age 2 Official Guide

This beautiful crane variation by Eric Joisel has to be one of my favorites. Watch the master himself at work in this video. Mine certainly doesn't do it justice.

These last two are very different and in no way resemble a traditional crane. They will probably not be included in my crane count. I did not even make clean versions of them, just kept the rough kraft paper drafts. I thought they were interesting models though, despite how messy they look.

Flying crane

Crane in Flight

For some great resources and diagrams, visit the Origami Resource Center.

Onward to the 1000!