She was Lonely

...or so the lioness said. So I wove her a companion.



Here's a closeup of his eyes:



He's not a terribly cheerful fellow; I hope the lady likes him!

After I finished Mr. Lion, I decided it's getting time to design some multicolor work, with more going on than just a single warp an a single weft. So I designed a weave blanket for weft-backed satin. A weave blanket is a sample that contains all of the possible weaves one might want to use in a given weaving. I have been studying the weft-backed satin chapter in The Woven Pixel, so I tried my hand at a set of structures that would give me 7 shades of grey and 2 shades of green.



Or so I thought. When I started weaving, I quickly realized that Oooops! the area where I expected the darker green to show up was in fact weaving a shade of grey. Instead of the green warp showing on the face, the white weft popped up. Back to Photoshop, to correct the incorrect pattern fill, and the next try was better. Never mind that there's a weaving error (mine) so the satin is interrupted, and also never mind that a warp end broke and tangled itself all across the web, and in addition never mind that there was a hook that got stuck in the "up" position for most of the sample, creating a long float on the face of the cloth, and PLEASE ignore the crappy selvedge on the right side. It's a sample, dammit.

Where the white weft is on the face, it weaves all but one of the 8-end satin variations - 1/7, 2/6, 3/5, 4/4, 5/3, and 6/2 (the dark background is the 7/1 equivalent). Where the green weft is on the face, it weaves either 1/7 satin, or 4/4 satin. I think. Probably.

My feeling is that the sett is too close for this structure (8-end satin with two wefts) so the weft doesn't have room to squish in and completely cover the warp in the weft-faced areas. I may try again with 10-end satin. Or not. I'll cut this (plus the the lion and the lioness) off the loom and wet finish them all, and then decide.

Right now, my brain is fried.