Dancing Crane: EAA Quilt Challenge #1: Black-White Plus 1 Other Color

Dancing Crane

Red.  This was my first idea for the EAA Quilt Challenge: Black-White Plus 1 Other Color.  It's based on Rikky Timms' convergence quilts. These are pretty quick and easy to do, once you know what size to cut the strips.   I like these because they come together relatively quick, and the result reminds me of weaving. ;-)   

Directions for Harmonic Convergence Quilts - from Roanoke Valley Star Quilter's Guild

Harmonic Convergence Calculator  - from the Roanoke Valley Star Quilter's Guild

But I also wanted to put my "stamp" on it and go beyond this basic idea, so I added the dancing crane. It also adds the black for the challenge requirements.

The crane silhouette is a stock image that I enlarged ...

 

... and printed to freezer paper and cut into a stencil so that I could push the paint through the holes.

 

I used plain old acrylic paint (black) with a little textile medium to paint through the stencil.

This is how it looked before I pulled off the freezer paper.

There were a few places that the freezer paper had not adhered fully, and it let thru a few bubbles of black paint.  It was easy enough to smooth those out though.

 The paint does soak through the fabric, so I worked on an old print board that I made years ago.  It's simply a piece of foam core (like for poster boards) covered with a pieces of batting and then muslin.  The batting gives it a cushy place for the stamps or other printables to press into ... 

 

All that to say: Be sure you have a blotter underneath.

The other option was to applique all those little pieces, but I didn't really want to take that approach.  That might have been easier with a stencil that was all black, without so many little pieces.  

After it was dry, I outlined the bird with fee-motion stitching to create a relief, meaning, the crane pops up out of the quilt.  Then I stitched-in-the-ditch following all the red and white blocks with invisible thread on the top and cream on the back.  

I used scraps of a Dream Wool batt.  That makes things pop up nicely once it's quilted.

For the quilting, I stitched-in-the-ditch for the convergence grid, being careful to avoid the bird.  I wanted that to pop up, trapunto-style.  I love this Dream Wool Batt -- I didn't have to do anything extra or special to make the crane 3D.

Stitching the borders required a different treatment ... So I did some measurements, and created a template for what I wanted to do.

To transfer it to the fabric, I created multiple paper templates that I could trace.  That worked out better than expected.  I stitched the arcs first, then added the pearls.

 

 

Once that was done, I added the cranes in the corners.  This worked best by tracing the corner cranes to quilting paper, and then stitched through them.  Because the paper gets perforated during the stitching, the paper is easy to pull off.

The last step was to add the straight lines above the pearly arcs.  I measured them out, and marked them with yellow and white chalk.  This took a little practice, but I finally got the hang of it.  Likewise with the stitching.  I found out that it worked better to use the 1/8-inch marker on the free-motion quilting foot, than to try to follow the 2nd line I had marked in chalk.  

Then I washed it to make all the layers meld, and work as a team.  The fabric paint faded from a thick layer to something much more translucent.  I like it better this way!  It had more depth and character now.  And movement.

Voi la!

The EAA Quilt Show is scheduled for July 27, 2023, here in Oshkosh, WI, at the Senior Center.  This one and many other challenge pieces will be on display if you want to see it live. ;-)