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Crane Dance was commissioned by Tim and Jeanne Freeman
of Portland, OR. They wanted something with an oriental
flavor to fit into their dining room, furnished in oriental
furniture with a cobalt blue Chinese rug. The quilt would
hang close to a large Japanese print of a dancer, wearing
a cobalt blue kimono with white cranes in the fabric. The
dancer is holding a red fan. Jeanne wanted something having
to do with fans. Since representational fans did not interest
me as a subject, I chose to make non-representational fan
shapes as a background. The birds were inspired by a beautiful
art photograph in National Geographic of Japanese cranes
doing their mating dance in the snow on Hokkaido, Japan's
northern most island. The birds were appliqued and machine
embroidered over the background of pieced fan shapes.
I chose cobalt blue for the background color, to echo the
furnishings of the room in which Crane Dance would hang,
and red to echo the red plumage on the heads of the cranes
and the red fan in the Japanese print. The quilt is bordered
with a commercially produced reproduction of a Japanese
block print in a blue and white fan pattern. A traditional
"Grandmother's Fan" block is pieced into the back
of the quilt as my tribute to the creativity of the anonymous
quilt artists of the past.
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