Thousand and One Cranes

My mother-in-law, husband and I recently put together a framed Thousand and One Cranes for a family member's recent wedding. In the Hawaiian-Japanese culture the crane symbolizes honor and loyalty, therefore an arrangement of cranes can usually be found at most Japanese-American weddings. The 1,001st crane symbolizes good luck. My husband's cousin and his wife are basketball coaches for an university in California, so a design pairing two basketballs was created by my mother-in-law. As an added touch, two big cranes were placed in the upper righthand corner to symbolize marriage. On the lower lefthand corner, she used the same gold cranes that were used for the basketballs to add the Japanese characters representing the new couple's last name.