Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

So, I have always been very fidgety, you know, always needed something to do with my hands.

Before there was origami cranes, there was always something.

You know, I was always playing with maybe a deck of cards, twirling a pencil or playing with rubber erasers.

It was always doing something with my hands, but what I found works the best with origami cranes is that it’s constructive, and I love that.

It’s doing something very passively to create something.

Well educated software engineer.

When’d you pick up your first sticky note?

Yeah, I’ve been folding cranes for a long time.

It’s something I picked up probably around middle school age, and I did it throughout the years, but really, when I started working in an office for the first time and being in long meetings for the first time and realizing, oh, I need to do something with my hands, sticky notes are everywhere in an office, and it just became my medium.

These ones are quite small.

Normally, I fold anywhere from like a 3 inch to a two inch here.

Out of sticky notes.

This is an origami paper crane That looks like a bird to me.

It is, yes.

When did you know you were doing art with your folding?

From the beginning.

So, you know, it was something that I wanted to learn to challenge myself, right?

You know, I knew about origami, and I thought, I’ll give it a try someday.

And I did it and I realized that it was something that really picked up for me.

It’s a very medititative practice in a way, because when you’re first learning it, you have to really focus on the folds that you’re doing and paying attention to it and being very precise And over the years, it’s just become something that has been wonderful to help with my restlessness.

I mean, you discover that it’s art, so I’ll go to that next statement of, are you using this as art?

So my art is what I have Grus Box So grus being Latin for crane, and then box being representative of the things that I put cranes in.

So I started with shadow boxes.

This was something that I started giving away to friends and family because I had to get the cres out of my house.

But at this point, I have so many cranes that I thought, what else can I put them in?

So I found different things from large jars to lanterns, to different arrangements I can do in different frames, things like that.

It’s quite a mindset that I have now of seeing something and thinking, I could put a few cranes in there.

First of all, tell me what you’re doing as we speak.

This is, you’re doing art while we’re talking, that is a talent.

Yes, exactly, yes.

So this is where it comes in, where it’s like, it’s something I can do, let my hands do while I’m focusing and paying attention to something else.

So I don’t really pay attention to the folds that I’m doing.

But each one of them is very intentional in a way.

It’s just a lot of muscle memory at this point So just letting my hands do this while I fold, and then as we talk, the cranes just keep coming out.

How does one study this art?

Say he or she wants to learn origami, wants to learn to do what you’re doing.

Before I have you slow down and actually make me one, so that we could all see.

Are there classes for this?

I think you mentioned?

Yeah, absolutely.

There’s definitely classes.

I’m not sure if there’s any available in Kalamazoo at the moment, of course, but.

Or something you can do.

You can teach it.. It’s true.

I have more than happy to.

and there’s plenty of resources online.

I would love to recommend people, you, go to a bookstore.

Lots of bookstores have how to do origami.

And a lot of the very basic folds are something that are fundamental in just how to fold the paper crane.

So learning how to fold the paper crane, you learn a lot of techniques that you can apply to other forms for origami as well.

Stop right there.

Give me a lesson.

All right, yeah, let me work with something a little bit bigger.

Yeah.

Okay.

But there’s other materials you use for this.

There are other materials, so there is origami paper, which is, made for origami.

It’s a thinner paper, it’s a lot easier to fold.

Sticky notes is just something that I find very accessible, and I love accessible materials, so it’s just, you know, what I went with So I’ll fold this one over the table here.

You start by folding the crane in half, and then half again.

It’s a very symmetrical art.

So pretty much anything you do to one side, you’ll end up doing it to the other side.

And I’ll go not too fast, but a little fast.

Here we go.

This brings us to our bird base, which is the base a basic fundamental of origami.

Like I mentioned, a lot of fundamentals are available that you you can learn in just learning how to fold an origami bird.

We’ll pop this side up.

This guy’s going to be our tail.

and then we’ll pop this side up, and we’ll make this side our head.

pop a little head down, fold their wings out, and there we go.

Fly away, Crane.

What else do you make??

Cranes are my thing.

You know, I can make other things, but the cranes are the ones that I choose to do It’s something that I’ve just done so often now, I don’t even have to think about it.

So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to fold this in half.

Folding of the origami crane is a very symmetrical process.

So when you do something to one side, you’re going to do it to the other side.

So once I finish folding this in half, I’m going to open it back up again.

I’m gonna fold in half diagonally the other way.

Now that you’ve got all of your nice creases, you can open that back up again, I like to fold it diagonally first.

Make sure all my creases are nice and crisp.

And then I’m going to fold this up.

And what you’ll find, once you’ve made all of those creases, is the origami paper will want to have this kind of natural fold, where you can kind of bring this down and make a square out of this.

It’s going to be called the preliminary base, which is one of the few bases that is a very fundamental when it comes to folding different origami things.

So this is the very first first step of folding the origami crane, as having this based on.

The next step is we’re going to do what’s called a kite fold And a lot of these folds are named in such a way that makes sense for for what you’re going to do.

So for the kite fold, we’re going to fold this into a kite.

So the important thing to keep in mind here is when you’re doing that is with the fliminary base, you have two sides of it.

You have an open end and then you also have a closed end.

So you want to make sure the open end is always what’s on the bottom of your kite shape.

So I’ve just done the kite fold here, and now I’m going to flip this over, and I’m going to do the same thing on the other side.

Tell me more about your design process and how you perhaps choose your color, or are they all one?

So, yeah, the colors, a lot of my art is very colorful, and that’s mostly intuit to the fact that I use sticky notes.

So Sticky notes are very colorful medium to use.

I do have a few pieces where I’ve chosen specifically to use one color for a specific thing, and those pieces, I find to be very striking, where you have one color of a bird, but there’s so many of them.

What I love about sticky notes is that they’re very bright, they’re very colorful.

So I love playing with that color, you know, blending certain ones together, that match or look really good together Or doing something that contrasts them.

You know, if they’re so bright and vibrant, there’s some completely on the other side of the color wheel from each other and playing with that and having that represent with the cranees are.

I need to know about the black series.

Tell me about this art.

Yeah, so the black series is one of my favorite ones that I’ve made.

So it’s got about 1,500 black origami cranes in it, and it’s also lit up with LED lights So it’s something that I find really draws somebody into it, and that’s what I love about that kind of art, is from a distance, you can’t really tell exactly what it is, but the closer you get to it, the more interesting that you can see, oh, this is made up of several thousand different pieces.

I have another piece that I don’t have it named at the moment, but what it is, is it is a I believe it’s a 12x 9 frame, something like that, a very standard frame.

And it’s got a number of yellow origami cranes in it, but there’s one single pink one in there.

the middle.

What I love about that one is it really reminds me of just a flock of birds, the yellow ones just flocking all around the one pink one in the middle.

All right, how many of these cranes have you made in your lifetime thus far?

That I wish I had a solid ball power number for.

I don’t really, but I can tell you that this year alone, I’ve made about 6,000.

Yes, and each each counts.

Each one counts, exactly.

Each one is a moment.

Now that we’ve got both sides down here with our pettle fold, this is now called the bird base, which is a pretty good spot to be in if you’re going to be folding an origami crane.

You want to get to this point here.

Now you should have kind of two legs here on the bottom.

So you’re going to want to do with those.

You want to fold those in half.

You’re going to find your your flat edge.

You’re going to bring that into the middle Now, this next fold here is, I would argue, it’s probably the trickier fold when it comes to folding.

An origami crane.

It’s going to be the inside reverse fold.

But what we’re going to do, we’re going to start by folding one side of our legs up.

and then we’re going to bring that back down.

I’m going to go over to the flip the flip side here.. And we’re going to do the same exact fold just to make sure that crease is nice and tight.

Here’s where it gets a little tricky.

What you’re going to do is you’re going to open up the inside.

So you have your flat face that we’ve been working with, where you have the legs that you folded on this side You’re going to turn it kind of at an angle and open it up.

And now you see you have the creases here that we made from creasing it just a moment ago.

You’re going to kind of push it up.

And what you’ll see is that it’ll naturally kind of want to fall into those creases that we made.

You just kind of let it go.

And what you should see in the end is that you’ve kind of pushed that up inside and reverse.

So that’s the inside reverse bold.

We’re going to do that another time on the other side.

So if you didn’t get it quite right the first time, that’s all right.

It’s very symmetrical.

We’re going to do the same thing on this side.

I’m going to open it up.

You’ push that side up.

I let the sides fall in.

And there you go.

Now, the last part of the origami crane is the only part that’s not symmetrical.

And this is the part where I like to tell people who are learning for the first time.

You want to pick your least favorite side, and it’s okay if you have a least favorite side, because that side, we’re going to turn that into our head.

So it’s the same fold.

It’s an inside reverse fold.

So you want to start by making a couple of smaller creases here for where our head is going to be And then you’re going to want to open it up from the inside and let that head push down and fold it so it is inside, just like the other ones, but reversed.

In the last step, you just got to fold your wings down.

That’s how you make a paper origami crane.

What reaction do you get from those who watch you do what you do?

Probably the number one reaction that I get is people who see me doing this, they say, you’re not looking.

And that’s the key thing for me is that it’s not about focusing on the folds at this point.

It’s about focusing on the moment and I’m having with another person or in a meeting or watching a movie, you know, and the cranes are just a byproduct of that moment.

Is it to encourage those who self disclosed are fidgety, that need to do things with their hands, yet look what you’re making, how important is it you encourage that?

I really encourage it.

It’s something that I’ve encouraged a lot of people to do, and I’m proud to admit that some people I know have picked up the habit for me.

I think that it’s a wonderful thing about creating something well, also helping yourself pay attention to something else.

So it’s what I like about the constructive aspect of it is that it’s a very passive construction, but it’s very real and it’s very tangible once you’re done with it.

Now, what are you going to do with all those we’ve just made?

Going to keep filling up the jar?

That’s the plan.

Jeff, is this where I come to make a book?

It is where you come to make a book, and all the different parts that go into a book.

That’s part of the program, too.

So we do everything from making paper by hand to setting type, like the old fashioned way.

We use individual letters, put them together, and then print them in an old fashioned printing press, and we do book binding, but we also work a lot with writers, writers and artists.

That’s a big passion for us, is to create projects that writers and artists can collaborate together.

We work with a lot lots of different people, so we have a program, we have programs with public schools and with youth organizations in town and with public libraries or people who come here, or we also go on location and work with them to make books or to make prints.

We also have a lot of people who sign up for our workshops.

We have a regular list of workshops that we put out every quarter of classes that you can take here, so you can come here and take a class, learn how to make paper, learn how to set type, learn how to print, or learn how to bind a book We also work a lot with poets who write the books that we print, and you can take poetry workshops here as well.

When did this world of of books come into your life?

Well, I’ve been making books like this back since I was about in my 20s.

So back in the ’90s, when I first started printing books like this, and I was in California and then eventually, I moved here to Michigan, and we started the book arts center 20 years ago.

And I want to talk about the art of making a book.

Where do we even start with that?

Yeah.

If we start from the very beginning and want to make some hand made paper, we have machines here that take various kinds of fibers and beat them so that they create a kind of a pulp.. You say beat?

Like there is a machine that literally beats the fibers, that will separate the fibers of the material, like cotton, for example, which we use a lot.

So, we’re making paper today.

I’m starting with this pulp.

It is ground up cotton, and there’s also some recycled cotton in there.

We like to use the cotton fibers because they have nice long fibers that hold together.

So it’s basically just water and then I’m going to use my tools.

I have a mold, which is like a screen and a deckle, which is like a frame that go together like this.

And then I’m going to hold them with my fingers tight and dip down underneath the pulp.

Bring it up while shaking , to form the paper, and then I’m going to take the deckle off.

The deckle leaves a nice rectangular shape there, so that a nice sheet is formed, and then I’m bringing it over to my post, which is just a piece of felt right now.

And I’m pushing down on the wood part of my deckle, sometimes the first one doesn’t always stick.

So I’m going to push a little bit on the screen, bring it up.

So there is a piece of paper.

And for this one, I’m going to use a stencil to add a little bit more color to it.

So I just have a plastic stencil here.

And in these bottles, I have pulp that has been ground up even more, finely, than the pulp that we use, so it’s just in a beater longer.

And I put pigment in it.

And this really, because I’m using a stencil.

It doesn’t really matter if I painting nicely.

Later on, if you’re looking around the studio and you see some of the nice pulp paintings, they spend time and did a really pretty job doing this part because of the stencil, I’m just going to be putting it on, kind of loosely like this, and then spreading it with my hand, and that just gets it into the cracks easily.

I hope it shows up okay with the green on green kind of look.

It should look cool, though.

And then you stick them into a hydraulic press, which puts 2,000 pounds of pressure on them, and squeezes all the water out and forces the fibers to knit together to create a sheet of paper.

So when you first make it, it looks like oatmeal.

It doesn’t look look like anything that you could pick up.

But after it comes out of the hydraulic press you can pick it up, just like you’re holding a wet napkin, and then we put it into a drying press and dry it out to make the paper.

So that would be the first step.

And then we also do traditional letterpress printing.

Letterpress printing goes all the way back to the beginning of book printing with Gutenberg, who first invented it in Germany in the 15th century, where you take individual letters that are either cast out of lead or made out out of wood, and you put all the letters together into words and sentences and paragraphs, one character at a time, and then you put it on an old fashioned printing press and print the pages of your book with the pictures and the type.

Tell me about the talents of Katie and what she has prepared.

Katie’s been involved in the book arts center from the very beginning.

She’s the studio manager.

She’s involved in everything here.

So she teaches kids or she teaches workshops to adults She works also with we have interns that work here.

We usually have up to about five interns every semester from Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University.

They work throughout the semester and learn all the things that we do here.

We also have interns that work with us from local high schools Usually, these are students that are really interested in advanced in art and have intentions to go on to study art in college.

So this is a really good opportunity for them to have an experience that can add to their college application.

Take me to this journey of the letterpress and where we were, where we are, and where we could be in the future digitally.

Sure.

So the printing industry changed enormously in the 20th century, and a lot of the equipment that had been used for hundreds of years was being junked, because the printing industry didn’t need them anymore.

They had these new advanced processes that they could use to create books books So a lot of that old equipment in the last 50 years or so has been acquired by artists to use for hand bookmaking.

So this is a Vendor Cook letterterpress.

We’re going to be printing these letters, as you can see, they’re backwards.

And they’re from our collection of wood type.

All around you, there’’s more type.

I’m sure Jeff will talk about it, but we have a lot of little teeny type for making books and big type for making posters.

So hopefully this has KBAC when it’s forward.

Since everything we do here is backwards until it prints and then it becomes forwards.

And right now I’m just locking it up.

So I’ve picked out my letters and I put furniture on every side of the words I picked out.

And then I’m moving the furniture to get it tight enough that I can lock it into place This is called a quoin with a Q and a key.

So that’s going to put tension that way.

And then I’m going to grab a lockup bar from down here, and that’s going to put tension on it from that direction.

and it should be all set set to print now.

I’m going to turn on the press, and the press does a couple of things.

Right now, it has a purplish ink on it that you can see.

So right now, it’s oscillating and it’s getting these two rubber rollers here, inky, so that when they go over the letters, which are 0.918 inches tall, it’s going to put ink onto the letters.

So my first step is to get ink the letters and push forward.

Still, the B is must be a little bit damaged.

That’s okay.

It should work okay from what we’re doing.

So to use the Vandercook, I put my foot on this pedal, which lifts up these grippers that hold the paper.

So I’m putting the paper about where I think the letters are going to be, and then I can move this guide here, so I can guess where it’s going to be on the paper.

Then I’m going to take my foot off the pedal so that the grippers go down, and then I’m going to move across So.

There we go.

So this is actually, I did pretty good lining it up.

I print all the time, so, you know, what do you expect?

And I will now print my good copy.

So when we’re printing, we’re usually printing for our broadsides, which are one of the smaller editions that we do.

We print about 30 copies at a time.

And for our books, we print about 100 copies.

So we can print pretty fast.

Setting the type takes a while, getting the press bed ready takes a while, fixing things like that B that isn’trinting exactly right.

takes a while, but the actual printing part goes fast.

So it’s a great way of reproducing things.

And, you know, I can get a pretty steady result most of the time.

What?

Will what you do ever be taken away by digital technology, by someone pushing a button, saying, "Go make a book, and it happens?

I don’t think so, because, we already have that.

We do have digital processes, and we do have print on demand books.

And those are, you, good things and useful things for getting books distributed widely and easily.

But the difference in the kind of books that we make is that because they’re made by hand and because so much care goes into them, when somebody reads a book like ours, they sense that instantly, and I think that it causes them to kind of slow down and sort of appreciate what they’re looking at, what they’re’re reading in a more special way, because they recognize that this is not just a book that was created on a machine This is a work of art.

And so it’s treated that way.

My feeling is, this space has a really positive energy and that people feel that when they come in the space.

There’s such an interesting variety of things to look at.

We have a gallery where we always have things on display, We often do poetry readings and exhibitions, so we have a lot of people that come here as the audiences for those things.

And while they’re here for a poetry reading, they also wander around, fascinated by the antique equipment.

So one other thing that we do here is I was a fullbright scholar to Italy 18 years ago to study the history of printing in Italy.

and I’ve been going back to Italy ever since.

So I’ve been taking groups of students to Italy for many years now, to work in traditional printing studios in Italy.

We’ve also taken groups of people who sign up through the book arts Center, so non students, but adults.

In fact, I have one person this year who’s going to join us in Venice, who’s coming from South Africa to meet us there to be part of this program.

So we’ll be offering this program again in the summer of 2026.

Internationally known.

We have become internationally known here, yes, at the Book Arts Center.

Be sure to find us on YouTube and Instagram.

Exclusive videos, extended content, and behind the scenes pictures.

Just search Kalamazoo Lively Arts Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.