Kona Nightingale

My home town of Kailua Kona is famous for it's aromatic and mild Kona coffee. Amazingly, the coffee trees that produce these world class beans do not grow in thick beds of fertile soil, but on hills of lava rock. Even today, all coffee is hand-picked and loaded into 100 pound bags, which are then transported to sites where the bean can be extracted from the coffee cherry and dried. In the early years, donkeys carried the 100 pound bags of coffee from the field where they were harvested to the area where they would be processed. Most coffee farms had one donkey because that's what the farm needed and that's what the farmer could afford. So the donkeys would get lonely and bray loudly to each other during the night, thus earning themselves the name "Kona Nightingales."

Some designs take years to figure out and some just quickly fall into place. Kona Nightingale is one that just fell into place.  I saw a flyer for the annual Kona Coffee Festival and thought, "I should make an origami Kona Nightingale." I dyed a grey-ish square of paper and started folding the rough shape of a donkey and suddenly, there she was.