Prompted by seeing the movie Paradise Road again recently, I’ve been chatting to a long time friend about instances of art sustaining people in dire circumstances. In real life, and well before the movie, the women’s chorus that she used to sing with had recreated the music for the first time since it was sung in the prison camp. I mentioned the puppet play story Gary Friendman is making into a documentary, Looking for a Monster, and she pointed me to I never saw another butterfly, a book of art and poetry by children at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Terezin CZ.

So this is how I found the The Butterfly Project, an activity being run by the Holocaust Museum Houston to try collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies, the same number of children who died in the Holocaust. You are invited to create and send in handmade arts-and-crafts butterflies, which will eventually comprise an exhibition, currently scheduled for Spring 2012. At the moment they have about 400,000 butterflies.

Seems like an idea that the internet craft communities might like to latch onto – Whip Up!, Craft.