Stash Reduction

The knitting kind. I've been doing some knitting in the evenings, and am now almost halfway through a vest using a really beautiful yarn that I bought over 20 years ago. (I like my yarn well aged.)



So far, I've finished knitting one panel, and blocked it today.

The pattern is a simple one: you knit two rectangles on the bias, and they become the front and back of the vest. With the addition of two side gussets and two shoulder extensions, plus some ribbing around all the edges, that's it. Sometimes, easy is what you need.

More Big Sur

The Big Sur weaving is now finished. Not "finished" as in "cut off and wet finished," but the weaving is completed.



Oddly, even though though the sparkle of the metallic yarn is very obvious to the [human] eye, the camera doesn't see it. Even in closeup, those areas look like plain old gold rayon:



But however the camera sees the piece, I'm very happy with how this one turned out.

By the time this piece was finished, the view of the Golden Gate Bridge was glorious under the loom:

Big Sur

Late yesterday, I wove the test strip and then the first few inches of the Big Sur image.



In the test strip, the gold yarn in the logo looked kind of wimpy, so I'm trying an experiment with metallic thread, which I laid in along with the gold yarn, but only where the gold appears on the surface (the logo and the tops of the rocks where the sun strikes them). It's a challenge getting the metallic placed on top of the gold thread, but since the effect I'm after is a very subtle sparkle, it almost doesn't matter. In this closeup, if you click the image to display the full-size version, I think you can distinguish between the metallic and the gold.



It was a very slow process, so I'm relieved that the gold appears on the surface in only a few distinct areas.

Once I got past the logo (working at a snail's pace), things sped up to the usual tortoise-like speed of 3-shuttle weaving. Soon, I was treated to a view of the surging wave:



And then the spray where the wave has crashed on the rocks:



By quitting time, I was at the 1,000-pick mark. However, the remaining 500 or so picks will take a while, because that's where there are large areas of gold, which will need the metallic laid carefully (and slowly) in the shed.

Another Look Under the Loom

As I finished the bridge image, the Channel Islands image was visible under the loom. Sorry, it's a terrible photo, not properly in focus. My only excuse is that it's dark down there (especially after the daylight has gone and there's only a pitiful amount of artificial light for the poor camera to judge color and focus by).



Next up: Big Sur.

The Bridge in Fog, Dawn

Today was sooo much fun! After weaving just the border and some foggy ocean yesterday, I got to the fun part today:







At this point, I only have 100 or so picks to weave of the image (just sky...) then the top border. But I'm really liking how it's turning out. So many details are just hints - the bridge cables, and the city skyline, for example:





I hope you had as much fun today as I did :>)

Samples, and Real Weaving

Yes, I know. I'm the original "I only weave full-sized samples, that's it!" person. A scarf? That's a sample, isn't it?

But on the jacquard loom, because the choice of weft color is so critical to the overall appearance of the piece, I've had to change my ways and make samples. For this I use the strip of color chips at the bottom of each of my image files. First I use those chips to make it easier to selectively assign weaves to colors. Then I use the chips as test strips.

Yesterday, I wove the test strip for the Big Sur piece (original image shown here) and thought I had a good selection of colors for the wefts: a turquoise blue, white, and a deep rust for the highlights on the rocks where the morning sun hits just the top edges. The test strip looked okay, so I went ahead and wove the first few inches of the real piece. Ooops.



The deep rust makes all the "black" areas too red/brown. Which I wouldn't mind in the border, but where there are "black" areas in the surf that have a reddish cast, I do mind. So I decided to scrap what I'd woven so far and try a different weft in place of the rust - something that would work as the highlight on the rocks, and still look water-ish in the "black" areas. I tried a bright gold - maybe you can see the difference in this closeup if you click to enlarge:



The bright gold is a little too bright, so I went back to the dyepots, and tried for a duller, darker gold. It's drying as I write, and hopefully it'll play nice in the image.

In the meantime, because I still had most of the afternoon to work, I started weaving the image of the Golden Gate Bridge (image shown here, lower on the page than the Big Sur image):



The wefts are a greyed blue-violet, a bright orange, and a pale grey. In this piece, I don't mind the reddish cast in the "black" areas, because those areas are land, bridge, or buildings - not water!

BTW, I put quotes around the term "black" because in the satin structures on the jacquard, the wefts have to interlace with the warp in 9-end satin order (1/8, 2/7, 3/6, 4/5, 5/4, 6/3, 7/2, or 8/1, according to how bright or dark I want the weft color to look), so they do appear on the surface occasionally. This means there is no true black, because any "black" area has flecks (however tiny) of each of the weft colors showing among the warp threads, as you can see in the closeup.

Under the Loom

Today was a day for catching up on missed sleep, winding dyed skeins onto cones, and measuring skeins to be dyed. Not much happening on the looms themselves, although I did notice that the Joshua Tree image was now almost completely visible under the knee beam of the jacquard loom:



I'm hoping to begin a new jacquard image tomorrow - at the very least, you'll see the sample blanket for Big Sur (originally shown here).