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Saturday, October 16, 2010

Weaving Space

Although I have stacks of images queued up and ready to weave - more trees and more flowers - I spent some time with the NASA image archives and picked one to use as a sample. I'm curious to discover whether the space images will translate to textiles. Maybe they will, maybe not.

The image I chose is the Wizard Nebula. This is the original JPG from the NASA site:



And here it is after cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast, and indexing to 14 colors (some blues, some golds, some oranges:



Of course, after substituting weaves (10-end shaded satins with three wefts), we're back to the faith thing. "Yes, Dorothy, there is a Santa Claus; that mess of black and white pixels will really bring the right color to the surface in the right proportion at the right spot."



Here's an idea of what the pattern preset looks like. The left-hand columns are just a memory aid to me, so I can easily tell which weft is doing what as I create the weave; they don't get included in the fill pattern defined in PhotoShop. In this example, weft A and weft C are weaving 9/1 (warp-faced) satin, while weft B is weaving 1/9 (weft-faced) satin. The result is that B is mostly on the face of the cloth, and A and C are mostly on the back. There are variations of this for every possible shaded satin of A, B, and C.



Weaving begins today. Photos to follow...

3 comments:

Laura Fry said...

Ah yes, that old faith thing! Leap and the net will appear! :D

Really looking forward to seeing how this image translates!!!

Cheers,
Laura

Bonnie Inouye said...

Your woven Nebula looks beautiful. It would be interesting to see this next to the tapestry pictured on page 8 of the current Handwoven. Different fibers and structure but related space images- Shiva Dances, by Barbara Heller, took second prize in the American Tapestry Biennial. Both of these space images show amazing depth and star-spangled beauty.

neki desu said...

i had a teacher who said that the true faith test was buying canned peaches.and we keep going back to the supermarket!
beautiful image, looks like a fractal.but of course it's all interrelated.