Origami fun

The seed of the idea of our adventure with origami began 2 Fridays ago at lunch. Elizabeth, who volunteers at the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, said that she'd been cleaning out closets full of old calendars. These calendars feature artwork of our local artists and are of superior quality. We hated the thought of these fine calendars being hidden in a closet, so we began to brainstorm what we could do with them. I suggested origami but since none of us were skilled in the craft, we knew we needed a teacher. The group seemed enthusiastic about the idea, so I sent out an email asking if any of our members knew of a teacher on island. I got a few names recommended to me but before I had a chance to contact anyone, Melinda wrote and said she'd taught herself how to do a box and a crane and would be glad to teach our group. This past Friday she brought some samples of her efforts and we were impressed.
We decided to meet this morning at Elizabeth's home and I sent out another email inviting any of our members who were interested to join us. We had a blast! Melinda patiently taught our group how to make boxes complete with lids and we LOVED how they turned out! After spending several hours (the time really just flew!) we decided that we were ready to make cranes, except we'd call ours egrets since we don't have cranes on St. Croix. Unfortunately, we only had time to make one each before it was time to clean up.






While we were doing this, Laura suggested the Palletteers put together a collection of our members art into a book. It could be a yearly fund-raising effort that would cover our costs and enable us to also donate some of our profits to one of the island's charities. We liked that idea... a lot!



Elizabeth also showed us how she'd glued strips from the calendars to plain gift bags: How neat they looked!
We helped Elizabeth bring the boxes to the museum for them to sell. While there, some cruise ship tourists were admiring our boxes and told us they'd pay $4 for the larger one and $2 for the small one (perfect for a ring)! Great!


We were all pretty pleased with our box-making efforts but we realized that some of us, me among them, need much more practice making our egrets. I'm sure you'll agree: My egret is the white one.. poor little thing!