Whipped Cosmos & Origami Cranes

Question: How do you know you’re a weirdo art teacher?

Answer: When your idea of a good time is having a martini with your mom and making origami paper cranes.  Yes, I have issues. 

Yesterday was a long day my friends.  Yesterday (and every Tuesday) consists of teaching 167 students with no break except a 30 minute lunch, then I teach an after school program for an additional hour & a half.  Crazy.  I had my awesome Father-In-Law over for a soup & salad dinner 🙂

Then my mom came over.  By this point I was exhausted and stressed from buzzing along all day.  So I made us a Whipped Cosmo (I invented it after thorough research and development 😉 )

MINDY’S WHIPPED COSMO

serves 1

1.5 oz  Pinnacle Whipped Cream Vodka

1 oz diet cranberry juice

splash of seltzer (lime flavor is closest to the original Cosmo.  I used unflavored)

ice

toss ingredients into a shaker, give it a few shakes

Garnish with pink rock candy 😉

Like I said, it was a long day, so there was no garnish involved.  Who has time for that?  LOL!

After the first one (lol) , my mother asked me what was new at work.  This was a loaded question.  I gave her the Cliff Notes version and told her that some of my classes were making 1,000 origami cranes for Peace Day which we are celebrating in September (we started making them now so we aren’t rushed at the beginning of the school year).  She was pretty shocked at the amount that we set out to make until I told her my very long explanation. 

Here’s the Wikipedia version:

The Thousand Origami Cranes has become a symbol of world peace^{[citation needed]} through the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who tried to stave off her death from leukemia as a result of radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II by making one thousand origami cranes, having folded only 644 before her death, and that her friends completed and buried them all with her. (This is only one version of the story. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum states that she did, in fact, complete the 1,000 cranes.)

Her story is told in the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Several temples, including some in Tokyo and Hiroshima, have eternal flames for World Peace. At these temples, school groups or individuals often donate Senbazuru to add to the prayer for peace. The cranes are left exposed to the elements, slowly dissolving and becoming tattered as the wish is released. In this way they are related to the prayer flags of India and Tibet.

To make a long story short, my mom said that she never tried origami (the art of paper-folding).  Being an art teacher, I found this absurd!  So I whipped out a few pieces of square paper and did what I do.  I taught her how to make one.  Then two!  She was a natural. 

If you want to try this project out, click here.

a few stringed paper cranes would make an adorable hanging mobile in a child’s room or even origami flowers would be fabulous if you fill a vase with them.

Have you ever tried origami?  What did you make?