Woman Makes Origami For Fallen Servicemen
June 5th, 2008, 4:29 pm Hobby Shops
When Judy Dunn looked over and saw her sixth-grade classmate folding an origami crane out of a scrap of paper, she never could have imagined it would be the starting point of a project as ambitious in scope as she now faces.
Dunn, now a 51-year-old local craft artist, is currently folding a crane for every U.S. serviceman and woman killed in Iraq — all 4,087 — to memorialize each life cut short.
“This became a way for me to say, ‘I want to honor these people,’†said Dunn, sitting in her workshop in her Faulkner Hill Road home, six finished cranes drying in a muffin tin on her desk. “Each one represents somebody whose story ended too soon.â€
Unlike traditional origami, which uses paper, Dunn uses polymer clay, flattened out using a pasta machine and folded into shape. The color of cookie dough, each crane bears the name of a soldier, the date and location they were killed and the cause of death on its wings. So far she has finished cranes for all the soldiers killed in 2003 and is about a quarter of the way through 2004.
After teaching herself how to fold cranes in grade school, Dunn continued origami as a hobby off and on through the years. On a whim, she decided to try making a crane out of polymer clay. It took some practice, but after a few weeks, she had something that began to resemble a crane.
She kept it up as a something of a party trick until she got a call from a grieving father in Indiana. He had seen Dunn’s work on the Internet and asked her to make a dozen cranes to memorialize his son, Bobby, a longtime origami enthusiast and Marine killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Bobby’s father asked that Dunn print “Bobby†on one wing of each crane and “Believe†on the other.
Suddenly, Dunn’s hobby had become something much more meaningful.
“When I found out the story of why he wanted the cranes, everything shifted,†she said. “I said, ‘I have to take this seriously. It’s more than just a fun thing.’â€
Other heart wrenching stories followed. Dunn made clay cranes for siblings of a young man who committed suicide and the family of a child who died in infancy.
Tags: cause of death, cookie dough, craft artist, cranes, faulkner hill, fun thing, Hobby, judy dunn, pasta machine, polymer clay, roadside bomb in iraq, scope, serviceman, soldier, son bobby, traditional origami, whim, wingsRelated posts
