In Japanese culture, if someone folds 1000 paper cranes, their wish will come true. It also symbolizes luck, hope, and healing through difficult situations.

I was inspired with this concept of luck when a series of unfortunate events happened to me in the span of one morning, and my friend, who has made 100 paper cranes for his loved ones, said: “Lady Luck’s a bitch.” He wasn’t wrong.

But it made me think, I want to be Lady Luck. So first, I and Shaskia decided to make cranes. Something we wanted to do was to make something wearable, like earrings. Make super small paper cranes and use a metal wire to make it into an earring. But we decided that it would be too small and simple, so something else that would be wearable is a headpiece. Originally, we wanted to make as many as 100, but we didn’t have the time. Also, we weren’t sure how to put all of them on the crown.

Making the cranes were pretty difficult for me, but after a while, I learned and did not have to watch any instructions. We used paper from a book, so it has a manila stain on it, and also a magazine, and we chose colours that were cool toned. Specifically blues, purples, and deep reds. We also made them different sizes because we wanted it to be dynamic and overwhelming, instead of clean and organized.

Once we had the paper cranes, we were struggling to assemble it, so we decided to pierce the cranes with the wire. It was also a struggle because the wire was very limited and too soft for us to wrap another wire around it. So we did two layers of wire. The bottom one was more composed and linear, and the top layer was more spiked in terms of composition. To attach the two layers together, we bent the ends on each other. For them to stay upright, we sewed them together. We put some extra cranes on top of the cranes that were already there so it would be more dynamic.

We wanted to photograph the crown with a model in an all white outfit so it would complement the colours of the crown.