Bill Roberts photo
Lisa Turner, children’s program director shows some origami creations at the Aurora Public Library.
Aurora
September 09, 2008 10:10 AM
Faces & Places
Amanda Persico, Staff Writer
There is a Japanese legend that says if you build 1,000 paper cranes, a real crane will grant you one wish.
It’s said the crane lives for 1,000 years — one paper crane for each year.
Folding one sheet of square paper into a crane, with more than 20 folding steps, is the most common origami creation.
“It’s a true art form,” Aurora native Lisa Turner said. “You don’t use tape, glue or scissors.”
The paper crane legend lives on in the children’s book of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, where the young Sadako was diagnosed with leukemia, folded 1,000 paper cranes and wished for a cure.
Freelance crafter Mrs. Turner, having read the book in school, decided to keep the legend floating on vases set as centre pieces at her wedding. She folded 1,000 sheets of anything, from Sticky-Notes to gum wrappers to newspaper and even high-end wrapping paper. Days before her I Do’s, she needed 40 more cranes to make it an even 1,000.
“Everyone started helping fold,” she said. “It became a contest, who could fold the most the fastest?”
Mrs. Turner decorated the colourful cranes with gold sparkles, hung them with tulle and mini lights and displayed them on the head table, wishing for a long and happy marriage.
She teaches her folding skills at the Aurora Public Library.
Children want to display and show things off, making the origami fish the most popular, she said. And with teaching school-aged children, sometimes black is not just black.
“Children haven’t lost that creativity or sense of imagination,” she said. “If there are 10 adults, they will create the same thing, but with kids, there will be 10 different objects on the table. If there is a black stripe in the example, each kid will have a different colour and a different reason.”
Craft is quite different from art, Mrs. Turner said, calling it her calming creative hobby.
“Craft is about putting things together, without limitations,” she said. “Art is so formal and structured. All you have is the canvas.”
Mrs. Turner grew up in a crafty home. Her mother created and taught craft lessons in Aurora. Mrs. Turner also helped her mother create clothespin dolls of every character and sold them across Canada through the Eaton’s catalogue.
For more than six years, Mrs. Turner freelanced her crafty skills to libraries, community centres, senior centres and private groups. Some of her crafty art was also sold at craft shows.
With the prevalence of major chain craft stores and scrap-booking stores on the rise, crafting is not just a fad, Mrs. Turner said. Eventually, she would like to open her own crafting business from home.
“Crafting is a way to bring artistry into the adult world.”
Lisa Turner can be contacted at lisas.creations@hotmail.com