In case you missed it, last year I wrote about a side adventure exploring origami place card holders. It was a long time ago, I don’t blame you! I really have been thinking about wedding plans for a while now, but at the time I didn’t explain why I was looking into event planning.

I was generally looking for washi when I saw the hakobu cranes on LavenderHomeLondon’s Etsy store. I was immediately enamoured with the idea of having these adorn my wedding tables for the guests. After I got the book and folded some from the tester samples provided, I returned to the shop and ordered so many different colours of washi in preparation, both for the wedding planning and for other personal projects! In terms of budgeting, the lines are a bit blurred between the two so I can justify the cost… By the way, Washi is not the cheapest thing in the world, so if you are planning DIY wedding decorations on a tighter budget then I would try a different type of paper like printed patterns instead.

The yuzen washi packs I got are gorgeous. Each pack is a pack of 20 mixed patterned sheets in 14cm square size. I found that all my packs were 10 colours of two sheets each, with lovely gold reflections on most of the patterns. I ordered practically every colour I could get my hands on and it turned out to be a happy coincidence… I now have red, black, blue, green, purple, pink, and gold packs. The pink isn’t pictured below because I forgot to take a photo, and the green set was actually a green-and-gold-themed pack so I did some swapping around with an assorted pack that I also purchased to get a full set of green-themed washi. The gold pack will be pictured later, because I am using it for a different purpose.

I started folding a few cranes last year whilst I was still preparing my guest list and table plans, and only just recently finalised the guest list. My wedding venue has a max of 10 people per round table and 8 people at the head table with the bride and groom, so it works out well as I happen to have 10 distinct patterns. For every pattern, I folded one hakobu crane for the place card holder, and I also folded one regular crane to use for the centrepiece. I haven’t figured out exactly what sort of centrepiece I want to have yet, but I would love to use more origami cranes in some other way.

I have been assuming that my place cards will be 6in by 10in, not entirely sure if that is a standard size but I would not go for a larger size in case the cranes do topple over.

In an effort to organise my upcoming DIY projects, I bought a large storage box and multiple resealable plastic craft bags. I used white sticky labels to name each bag as well. I do get a bit conscious about the plastic waste involved, but I won’t have the time to dictate how the tables should be decorated, so I’ll need to make sure that my instructions are clear when I hand them off.

In my storage box now, I have a rainbow of cranes! I almost forgot to do the cranes for the head table because my mind wandered off to start new projects; I have a lot of different things juggled right now! And somehow this already takes up a fair bit of space, so I’m also going to need to buy more storage as well…

I found that it was quite easy to get the whole lot done once I got my labelling system going. Although this only makes up a small part of my wedding, I hope it adds a nice personal touch for the guests when they sit down. I also packed away the regular cranes for now but I will most likely return to them at a later point.

One project finally done, I think… No-one ever said a DIY wedding was going to be easy, did they?