The Banded Crane (Maki Tsuru)          A TT member spied a photo on the back of a Japanese book (ISBN4-8377-0395-X, Temari Nyumon/Hana  English title: Flower Temari, Beginner's Course)  and asked for help in working it out. The results from the group are summarized here, with particular thanks to Linda D, Elsie, Debi Barbara and Anastasia. This is nice experience in a wrapped bands pattern, and also quite a common pattern in Japanese examples.  Various interpretations of Tsuru (crane) are very common motifs in Japanese art, including temari.

If you are puzzled about why this pattern is called "Crane", don't feel bad, a lot of us were. We had determined that while it was the Japanese name for this pattern, that didn't help much until the cover photo of the current (March-April) issue of National Wildlife Magazine came in the mail, showing a stunning close-up of a crane. The temari, when worked in red, black and white as is more traditional, imitates the intersection of colors (white, red and black) on the head, neck and bill of particularly the males. Some species exhibit this more than others, but the image is visible on most all of them. The crane is a revered bird in Japan, so this connection now makes great sense. For more info and photos, you can visit http://whoopers.usgs.gov/

Linda D summarized the group's musings for everyone:

Prepare a 3 or 4 inch ball with a thread wrap and mark an S4 with an equator.  You can use a marking thread that matches your thread wrap, but I used Gold Rush and the wrapping covered it, plus I did a gold obi, so the equator marking line blended in with the obi.  Place keeper pins at each marking line that intersects the equator, so you should have 4 sets of keeper pins.

1. There is a gold wrapped obi (2cm).  I used 10 wraps of Gold Rush on each side of the center marking line.

2. The wrapped bands are about .7 cm wide on a 36 cm (diameter) mari. If you want to do a different size mari you can do it with fewer bands or you can calculate a new bandwidth but doing circumference divided by 4 and then by 12 for a good approximation.  (On a 3 inch ball I did 5 wraps, on a 4 inch 7 wraps for each band)

3. There are 4 sets of keeper pins (labeled A, B, C and D by Barbara) A and C are opposite, B and D are opposite.

4. The black band is wrapped first through pins A and C and goes just above the obi.  Then go to the second set of keeper pins and do the first white band, then back to black, alternating back and forth. There are 5 bands of black on each side of the PP and 5 bands of white.

5. Follow the picture of the temari for changing colours.  White goes above the black, a bright/third colour goes above the white. (the instructions above are ones that I think Debi posted, but I've added a little bit here and there)

I would suggest that if you have not done this type of wrapped design before try the Wrapped Pattern on page 50 of Mary Wood's book "The Craft of Temari" first.  The technique is identical, the differences are the obi is wrapped first and the bands begin right above the obi.  There was a question about the bands migrating.  Tension is important, if you wrap too tight the threads will move towards the PP, too loose and they don't look neat and tidy.

Hint:  When I wrapped this design I did not end off the coloured perle cotton, but did end off the metallic threads at the beginning of the bands.  I just let the skein/ball of perle cotton lay in my lap when I was using the opposite colour.  I didn't have a problem with tangling at all.

Elsie offered these thoughts and tips: The biggest problem I had was making the overlapping points follow a line perpendicular to the obi and halfway between the keepers.  They kept wanting to migrate toward the black keeper pins.  I finally marked the line halfway between the keepers, extending over the poles, with black sewing thread.  If I'd marked a simple 8, then these would have been the marking lines without keepers.  They also helped me measure the decreasing distance between completed bands and the poles.

Anastasia's in progress, showing obi and how bands overlap		While more easily seen in other photos, the inspiration for this pattern comes from the joining of the black and red at the bill.